My first thought are that obviously there are some Apple fans working at Google.
Still they've done a good job.
Now if you could just schedule meetings in Gmail and it would be a useful enterpise calendar.
Any pundit can expouse on what they think people do or not want, but successful companies don't make decisions that way. Apple created Boot Camp based on market research done on potential switchers.
Given that and the level of enthusiasm it's got from existing Mac users, it's hard to agree with this guy that Boot Camp is a waste of time.
From the start Apple, through advertising, has created a brand associated with individuality ("Think different"), anti-establishment, the power of the individual to change the world (eg. the 1984 ad), creativity, fun and style (think the Ipod ads).
Compare this to Microsoft or Dell which have always stood for the establishment, conservatism, respectability and reliability.
Think what you may about the irrationality of brand advertising which has little to do with actual products, the Apple message is consistent and people associate those qualities with Apple products.
6. Innovation and Excitement
Apple has consistently been ahead of the curve with the adoption of new technologies. This in combination with release-day product announcements has created a constant level of excitement associated with it's products.
Many people have defected from/. to digg.com - the reason being the stories are more interesting to the readers (since they selected by them through a voting process).
I don't know what criteria the/. editors use to select stories. Whatever it is - is does not work particularly well, as often stories turn out to be hoaxes, dups, spam, or rehashes of the same old things that presumably interest the editors, but often noone else. It would be same no matter who were the editors.
How about introducing a system where we (or subscribers) can vote for stories? Many eyes are usually better than one or two.
To me the term "senior" developer suggests someone who is a seasoned software engineer with proven experience of real-world development.
A senior developer is someone with experience in the full software-development life-cycle. Requirements analysis, design and architecture of large systems, including version control issues, bug-tracking, release management etc. Also someone with a broad knowledge of the programming technologies being employed. I doubt this label would really apply to most recent college graduates, who are likely to have a strong knowledge of theoretical computer science, but less knowledge of how software projects happen in the real world.
I can see the powerbook/ibook sensors becoming popular amoungst laptop music geeks as a controller for interactive performances. (making the computer more and more like an instrument that can be played live)
The time is up for companies that make money purely from software, open source or proprietary.
Software as a product is too tenuous a base for a organisation - one day you may have the market-leading product - the next someone has wiped you out with a competing free open source product. Platforms and technologies change so radidly - longevity is always going to be difficult. Many people never invest in a software companies for precisely this reason.
Base your company of services or real physical products that rely on your software, not the actual software itself.
> Whenever anybody says their product is really > similar to iPod or Tivo except for a few tiny > differences, I can guarantee you what the > differences are.
> Usability, physical beauty, and simplicity.
The other difference is the 'coolness' factor, the white headphones, the IPod ads and the Apple's brand recognition.
I suspect the coolness factor is the most difficult part for others to immitate.
Gizmodo is now linking to (possibly fake) leaked pictures of the headless iMac.
A few more ideas of 2004
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I don't know if any of these are really new
ideas but they seem to have come up a lot in 2004.
- Affordable space tourism for the masses
- Podcasting. ipod+time shifting+rss
- The Seriousness of Fake news. It seems like even the mainstream news channels like CNN have started to incorporate comedians and irony in their shows. Jon Stewart interviews John Kerry, and the daily show book is a best seller. Many articles are written about why people are so turned off the real news channels.
- Global Economic Crash imminent. The declining US dollar is at risk of being dumped by Asia and losing its status as world currency to the Euro - potentially trigger global economic crisis. Another scenario involves the 'peak oil' theory and the increasing price of oil.
- Fighting Terrorism using Drug War tactics. An interview with John Kerry in the NY Times magazine reveiled that his view of terrorism as a problem you fight locally in a similar fashion to drug cartels and not as a global war fought at the level of nations.
- Sex Slavery in America. A controversial piece of investigative journalism in the NY Times posited that sex slavery is widespread in the US.
This applies not just for your first job but your whole career.
If there's an advantage of going to a good school at undergrad level I would say it's in the connections that you form with smart people. These people are going to go on to create startups and work in cutting edge companies - oftening taking their friends with them.
Having said this, there definitely companies that only hire people with degrees from top tier schools (in NYC a lot of inventment banks and hedge funds are like that). There's also a lot of companies that don't hire people without Masters degrees or Phds. Whether these are the sorts of places you would want to work is another story.
BTW as an aside - I really doubt there is much difference between what is taught in CS classes at the top-tier schools and what is taught everywhere else - atleast at undergraduate level (at the graduate level i think it's much more important). When i see a resume with a degree from a good school, i'm more impressed that they got into the school considering all the competition (obviously it speaks to their work ethic). I'm not so impressed about what the person would have learnt there. It seems schools use the same textbooks and the course materials are very standard. (If you doubt this - look at the MIT online curriculum - it really is not very different from what is taught everywhere else).
The problem with Wikipedia is that anyone can edit an article, quality is difficult to maintain.
Perhaps they should move to some type of/. moderator like system where article contributers accept or reject each other's edits. Useful edits earn points that allow you to earn editorial points. (Also of course they could expand to a meta-editor system). A points system would also encourage contributions.
Sure search engines are killer apps for the Internet but that's because the web is intrinsically disorganised and distributed.
Is search really so relevant for a single computer and the average desktop user? Most people already organise their files in a somewhat structured way, and generally know where to find stuff. (Especially if they use OS X)
Sure powerful file search might be useful occasionally, but i don't see it as a huge issue that companies like M$ think it is.
> Miano sees such a dim future for programmers that > he decided to enter law school. "I saw the > handwriting on the wall," he says.
I'm not sure why he thinks legal service jobs are going to be any safer from outsourcing in the future.
I think there are few different trends in software development that interacting with each other.
I think the days of huge programmer shops in the US was always going to be over - but i don't see that as anything to be worried about.
I think there was always a move towards smaller but more skilled and experienced teams that can react quickly to changing markets. I think anyone who's been in industry for the last 10 years would have seen that happening. It's much harder now to get a programming job straight out of school now that it used to be. Companies are just not hiring inexperienced people anymore.
I suspect a lot the companies that are outsourcing development projects overlap a lot with the ones that used employ the 'mongolian hordes' technique here at home.
I think a lot of these companies just don't get that you don't large and expensive programmer teams to deliver value. Look at how Apple delivers better technology Microsfot with a fraction of the programming staff, They're leveraging what is already out there, but providing their own value on top.
> The 16.7MP of this camera is getting very close to > medium format (if not already there).
Not really, i'd say it's getting close to 35mm though.
Even a consumer grade 4000 DPI scanner gives you a 21MP image from 35mm film, and drum scanners can go higher than 8000DPI and still get detail.
Medium format film - even say 4x5" film scanned at a modest 3300 dpi gives you over a 200MP image with plenty of detail to spare.
In the end though the amount of detail you can get is limited not just by the sensors but also by the amount of light coming in the lense, and a 35mm equivalent digital camera is only receiving roughly a 1/4 the amount of light of a medium format camera.
> Stanley Kubrick's films are very different than typical > Hollywood fare -- you may not like them, appreciate them, or > even get them, but you can't deny that they're art.
yeah. I think 'Dr Strangelove' and 'Clockwork Orange' could have could easily have been on the list too. I suspect they were biased towards relatively recent films.
I think Java is most seen as uncool because it's simple (or atleast the complexity is pushed into the APIs) and it's used mostly for enterprise development that traditionally COBOL was used for, and not for desktop apps and systems programming (not that you can't do these in Java).
It does have some redeeming features tho (it certaining is a better COBOL than COBOL!)
1) Java has absolutely the best programming tools out there
There is nothing out there that touches the Java IDEs such as Eclipse and Intellij. Some of the advanced features they provide like intelligent code completion and some of the refactoring support are impossible to do with weakly typed languages such as Perl or Python, and very difficult to do with natively compiled languages such as C/C++.
2) Java seems to becoming popular for a lot of OO and software engineering research. A lot of the originator of ideas such as design patterns (Erick gamma), refactoring (Martin fowler), XP and test-driven development (Kent Beck, Ward cunningham) are Java people.
3) You can do some amazing hacks in Java, using features reflection, dynamic class loading and byte code engineering, etc.
C++ looks like it's more powerful than Java because it supports templates, operator overloading etc, but Java also has some features that let you do some quite advanced things. For example look at the Jakarta Byte code engine library (BCEL) and look how it has been used in AspectJ and Jython. For example in Jython you can run an embedded Python script in your application that can seemlessly call any Java code, catch Java exceptions and so forth - i can't think of any language designed for embedded scripting that is this convenient.
4) Java has a huge open-source development community
The average Linux desktop user probably doesn't realise this, but there is absolutely piles of open-source Java development going on. A lot of this is on libraries useful for server-side enterprise deployment, web frameworks, workflow engines, object-persistence layers etc. but there is no shortage of projects out there.
On the whole i think the Java world is more interesting that people give it credit for.
> Personally, I think its a rag. It's old, its > big, its supposedly a "standard", but no more > relevant than my local paper.
There's a high chance your local paper decides what to put on their front page based on what the front page stories are in the NYT. How do they know? The stories the NYT are considering are sent out on AP Wire every afternoon.
The article is a very good summary of composition rules BUT the main reason most people's snaps are not well composed is quite simple - they don't look at the scene as a whole before they click the shutter button.
90% of people are only looking at the main subject of their photo. This is why most people put the main subject in the middle of the scene - why almost always results in bad composition.
This is where having either a SLR camera where you see the whole scene in the view-finder, or a preview screen on a digital camera is essential. Another essential feature is exposure and focus-lock that allows you to focus and take exposure readings off non-centered objects.
Slashdot Mirror
> Wrong. "ical" the name of a data standard.
I think you missed the point.
It was that Google Calendar looks a lot like Apple iCal.
My first thought are that obviously there are some Apple fans working at Google. Still they've done a good job. Now if you could just schedule meetings in Gmail and it would be a useful enterpise calendar.
Any pundit can expouse on what they think people do or not want, but successful companies don't make decisions that way. Apple created Boot Camp based on market research done on potential switchers.
Given that and the level of enthusiasm it's got from existing Mac users, it's hard to agree with this guy that Boot Camp is a waste of time.
A good summary, but i'd also add the following:
5. The power of the Apple brand.
From the start Apple, through advertising, has created a brand associated with individuality ("Think different"), anti-establishment, the power of the individual to change the world (eg. the 1984 ad), creativity, fun and style (think the Ipod ads).
Compare this to Microsoft or Dell which have always stood for the establishment, conservatism, respectability and reliability.
Think what you may about the irrationality of brand advertising which has little to do with actual products, the Apple message is consistent and people associate those qualities with Apple products.
6. Innovation and Excitement
Apple has consistently been ahead of the curve with the adoption of new technologies. This in combination with release-day product announcements has created a constant level of excitement associated with it's products.
Many people have defected from /. to digg.com - the reason being the stories are more interesting to the readers (since they selected by them through a voting process).
/. editors use to select stories. Whatever it is - is does not work particularly well, as often stories turn out to be hoaxes, dups, spam, or rehashes of the same old things that presumably interest the editors, but often noone else. It would be same no matter who were the editors.
I don't know what criteria the
How about introducing a system where we (or subscribers) can vote for stories? Many eyes are usually better than one or two.
To me the term "senior" developer suggests someone who is a seasoned software engineer with proven experience of real-world development.
A senior developer is someone with experience in the full software-development life-cycle. Requirements analysis, design and architecture of large systems, including version control issues, bug-tracking, release management etc. Also someone with a broad knowledge of the programming technologies being employed. I doubt this label would really apply to most recent college graduates, who are likely to have a strong knowledge of theoretical computer science, but less knowledge of how software projects happen in the real world.
Does anyone know if JDK 1.5 will be shipped with Tiger, and if so will it be the the default JVM?
This is one of the few pieces of software I run on Linux development box that is currently not available for OS X (not counting developer seeds).
I can see the powerbook/ibook sensors becoming popular amoungst laptop music geeks as a controller for interactive performances. (making the computer more and more like an instrument that can be played live)
The time is up for companies that make money purely from software, open source or proprietary.
Software as a product is too tenuous a base for a organisation - one day you may have the market-leading product - the next someone has wiped you out with a competing free open source product. Platforms and technologies change so radidly - longevity is always going to be difficult. Many people never invest in a software companies for precisely this reason.
Base your company of services or real physical products that rely on your software, not the actual software itself.
> Whenever anybody says their product is really
> similar to iPod or Tivo except for a few tiny
> differences, I can guarantee you what the
> differences are.
> Usability, physical beauty, and simplicity.
The other difference is the 'coolness' factor, the white headphones, the IPod ads and the Apple's brand recognition.
I suspect the coolness factor is the most difficult part for others to immitate.
The Apple developer site has an interesting article on how Delicious Library's use of the Cocoa bindings framework.
Gizmodo is now linking to (possibly fake) leaked pictures of the headless iMac.
I don't know if any of these are really new ideas but they seem to have come up a lot in 2004.
- Affordable space tourism for the masses
- Podcasting. ipod+time shifting+rss
- The Seriousness of Fake news. It seems like even the mainstream news channels like CNN have started to incorporate comedians and irony in their shows. Jon Stewart interviews John Kerry, and the daily show book is a best seller. Many articles are written about why people are so turned off the real news channels.
- Global Economic Crash imminent. The declining US dollar is at risk of being dumped by Asia and losing its status as world currency to the Euro - potentially trigger global economic crisis. Another scenario involves the 'peak oil' theory and the increasing price of oil.
- Fighting Terrorism using Drug War tactics. An interview with John Kerry in the NY Times magazine reveiled that his view of terrorism as a problem you fight locally in a similar fashion to drug cartels and not as a global war fought at the level of nations.
- Sex Slavery in America. A controversial piece of investigative journalism in the NY Times posited that sex slavery is widespread in the US.
> Your first job is all about who you know.
This applies not just for your first job but your whole career.
If there's an advantage of going to a good school at undergrad level I would say it's in the connections that you form with smart people. These people are going to go on to create startups and work in cutting edge companies - oftening taking their friends with them.
Having said this, there definitely companies that only hire people with degrees from top tier schools (in NYC a lot of inventment banks and hedge funds are like that). There's also a lot of companies that don't hire people without Masters degrees or Phds. Whether these are the sorts of places you would want to work is another story.
BTW as an aside - I really doubt there is much difference between what is taught in CS classes at the top-tier schools and what is taught everywhere else - atleast at undergraduate level (at the graduate level i think it's much more important).
When i see a resume with a degree from a good school, i'm more impressed that they got into the school considering all the competition (obviously it speaks to their work ethic). I'm not so impressed about what the person would have learnt there. It seems schools use the same textbooks and the course materials are very standard. (If you doubt this - look at the MIT online curriculum - it really is not very different from what is taught everywhere else).
The problem with Wikipedia is that anyone can edit an article, quality is difficult to maintain.
/. moderator like system where article contributers accept or reject each other's edits. Useful edits earn points that allow you to earn editorial points. (Also of course they could expand to a meta-editor system). A points system would also encourage contributions.
Perhaps they should move to some type of
Sure search engines are killer apps for the Internet but that's because the web is intrinsically disorganised and distributed.
Is search really so relevant for a single computer and the average desktop user? Most people already organise their files in a somewhat structured way, and generally know where to find stuff. (Especially if they use OS X)
Sure powerful file search might be useful occasionally, but i don't see it as a huge issue that companies like M$ think it is.
> Miano sees such a dim future for programmers that
> he decided to enter law school. "I saw the
> handwriting on the wall," he says.
I'm not sure why he thinks legal service jobs are going to be any safer from outsourcing in the future.
I think there are few different trends in software development that interacting with each other.
I think the days of huge programmer shops in the US was always going to be over - but i don't see that as anything to be worried about.
I think there was always a move towards smaller but more skilled and experienced teams that can react quickly to changing markets. I think anyone who's been in industry for the last 10 years would have seen that happening. It's much harder now to get a programming job straight out of school now that it used to be. Companies are just not hiring inexperienced people anymore.
I suspect a lot the companies that are outsourcing development projects overlap a lot with the ones that used employ the 'mongolian hordes' technique here at home.
I think a lot of these companies just don't get that you don't large and expensive programmer teams to deliver value. Look at how Apple delivers better technology Microsfot with a fraction of the programming staff, They're leveraging what is already out there, but providing their own value on top.
> The 16.7MP of this camera is getting very close to
> medium format (if not already there).
Not really, i'd say it's getting close to 35mm though.
Even a consumer grade 4000 DPI scanner gives you a 21MP image from 35mm film, and drum scanners can go higher than 8000DPI and still get detail.
Medium format film - even say 4x5" film scanned at a modest 3300 dpi gives you over a 200MP image with plenty of detail to spare.
In the end though the amount of detail you can get is limited not just by the sensors but also by the amount of light coming in the lense, and a 35mm equivalent digital camera is only receiving roughly a 1/4 the amount of light of a medium format camera.
> Stanley Kubrick's films are very different than typical
> Hollywood fare -- you may not like them, appreciate them, or
> even get them, but you can't deny that they're art.
yeah. I think 'Dr Strangelove' and 'Clockwork Orange' could have could easily have been on the list too. I suspect they were biased towards relatively recent films.
I think Java is most seen as uncool because it's simple (or atleast the complexity is pushed into the APIs) and it's used mostly for enterprise development that traditionally COBOL was used for, and not for desktop apps and systems programming (not that you can't do these in Java).
It does have some redeeming features tho (it certaining is a better COBOL than COBOL!)
1) Java has absolutely the best programming tools out there
There is nothing out there that touches the Java IDEs such as Eclipse and Intellij. Some of the advanced features they provide like intelligent code completion and some of the refactoring support are impossible to do with weakly typed languages such as Perl or Python, and very difficult to do with natively compiled languages such as C/C++.
2) Java seems to becoming popular for a lot of OO and software engineering research. A lot of the originator of ideas such as design patterns (Erick gamma), refactoring (Martin fowler), XP and test-driven development (Kent Beck, Ward cunningham) are Java people.
3) You can do some amazing hacks in Java, using features reflection, dynamic class loading and byte code engineering, etc.
C++ looks like it's more powerful than Java because it supports templates, operator overloading etc, but Java also has some features that let you do some quite advanced things. For example look at the Jakarta Byte code engine library (BCEL) and look how it has been used in AspectJ and Jython. For example in Jython you can run an embedded Python script in your application that can seemlessly call any Java code, catch Java exceptions and so forth - i can't think of any language designed for embedded scripting that is this convenient.
4) Java has a huge open-source development community
The average Linux desktop user probably doesn't realise this, but there is absolutely piles of open-source Java development going on. A lot of this is on libraries useful for server-side enterprise deployment, web frameworks, workflow engines, object-persistence layers etc. but there is no shortage of projects out there.
On the whole i think the Java world is more interesting that people give it credit for.
> Not trolling here, but this opinion piece is stupid.
I agree. It's not exactly hard to find a counter-example to his claim...
eg. from... John Carmack's
" I currently develop mostly on NT, and Quake 2 will almost certainly be delivered on win32 first"
http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.htm
The same thing happened to Radiohead's last album "Hail to the Thief", if anything it just caused more buzz and free publicity for the album.
People who are going to download the album, are going to download it, whether it's meant to be out or not.
> Personally, I think its a rag. It's old, its
> big, its supposedly a "standard", but no more
> relevant than my local paper.
There's a high chance your local paper decides what to put on their front page based on what the front page stories are in the NYT. How do they know? The stories the NYT are considering are sent out on AP Wire every afternoon.
> Where are the free software projects investigating
> next generation UI concepts?
Check out Sun's Project Looking Glass, a 3d desktop built on X11.
The article is a very good summary of composition rules BUT the main reason most people's snaps are not well composed is quite simple - they don't look at the scene as a whole before they click the shutter button.
90% of people are only looking at the main subject of their photo. This is why most people put the main subject in the middle of the scene - why almost always results in bad composition.
This is where having either a SLR camera where you see the whole scene in the view-finder, or a preview screen on a digital camera is essential.
Another essential feature is exposure and focus-lock that allows you to focus and take exposure readings off non-centered objects.