I find Spanish the least helpful language to know, personally. I've always lived in east coast urban US. I'm a native English speaker and know a little Spanish and one of my parents is off-the-boat Colombian (she speaks perfect English and lost a lot of her Spanish since she was a kid, so very little carried over to me). But frankly anywhere I have traveled where Spanish is prevalent, in our out of the US, English and one year of high school Spanish is more than enough to get by.
I basically only ever speak Spanish with native Spanish speakers for fun, very rarely because it was particularly useful. Getting by with English among Spanish speakers is a lot more about being patient and gracious: ask them if they speak English, thank them for speaking English, etc. BTW to my fellow Americans, that applies anywhere.
As an adult who does travel quite a bit and wants to learn a third language, I tried to approach this as an optimization problem. While by population Mandarin is high on the list, it's not very prevalent outside of China. When I realized sheer population wasn't going to be a helpful way to look at it, I started looking at the numbers of countries and both their primary and secondary languages. If you ignore English, it turns out that German, Italian, and French start looking really helpful... not for speaking in Germany, France, or Italy, but in the most number of other places that don't necessarily have a lot of English speakers. I'm opting for French, personally, but I couldn't find any real reason to pick one over the other.
But to the OP's question, if s/he is not planning to travel and is specifically asking about programming, I have never needed anything other than English while programming, ever. At that point I'd say, you clearly have an itch to learn a language, learn whatever language you want to learn.
Look, I was wanking daily by the time I was 12, I had access to porn years before that (probably at 8 or 9), and by that I mean magazines -- physical printed porn. This was before having internet in a household was common place, and I was one of the good kids (never had disciplinary problems, had to be home by 9:30pm, etc etc) and was a relatively late bloomer compared to my peers. Kids making out at parties started at 10ish. My first pregnant classmate was at 13. I'm currently healthy, married, MIT CS degree, successful career, not a single damned bad thing happened to me from having access to porn at 8 nor could anything short of living in North Korea or Alpha Complex have stopped me.
If you think this has any impact, even a little, on your 13 year old, you are completely delusional. At 13 they've already had as much access to it as they want to have. As for younger kids, if they're old enough to change the setting, they're old enough to find dozens of other ways to get at it, of which several won't even involve a computer. A better question would be how much alcohol or weed your 13 year old is going to have access to, if he doesn't already. Hint: Many of the honors/AP juniors/seniors do one or both regularly. Trust me.
Let's be fair here for a minute. "Here's a handful of rabid crazy vociferous bloggers with crazy opinions that will make an awesome headline that gets lots of page views" is very different from "random normal people whose primary use for their smartphone is to track and share recipes with relatives". Most news is news entertainment and is not a reflection of what sane normal people say and do. I assure you, real life iPhone users don't give a shit about Android phones and probably wouldn't even be able to tell you a single device that even uses it (*mumble mumble* Galaxy EVO Ice Cream *mumble mumble*), and the same goes true for Android users (*mumble mumble* iPhone 5GS II Turbo with Hyperfighting *mumble mumble*).
That depends on your definition of average, mathematically speaking that's not true. What percent of numbers are below average in this set: {1, 1, 1, 1, 1000}
This isn't pedantry, this is a meaningful distinction: I expect the amount of good software is extremely outnumbered by the bad, and even good software developers can be forced into kludges by time pressures, bad team culture, etc. I don't see any reason to think that code quality globally resembles a normal curve.
Yea that's not what this was though, this was a marketing term and they started pushing it very early. Similarly technical documentation for developers refers to it all as Metro, if they were going to change that because it's not the real name, they would have done it before it went RTM.
Consider this: they have no other name for it. "Aero" is still "Aero", but "Metro" is now "Windows-8 style UI".
Okay, wanking about whether or not people have entitlement issues is missing the core of the situation.
There are developers that will be new to.NET development, and there will be developers that have already been developing desktop applications against the Express versions of the software. If we have learned nothing from the gaming console or phone platform wars, it is that you want to encourage application development. Any barrier to entry or project sustainability, even one that is merely perceived, will cause some number of people to pick a different platform to learn and grow on, and the.NET ecosystem will shrink. There are plenty of other languages and IDEs to turn to that are free, easy, and reliably maintained without having to worry about version-ed crippleware.
I am a full-time.NET developer. I'm an MSDN subscriber and so am utterly independent of the Express versions. Yet I feel very strongly that incidents like this hurt me and hurt.NET development on the whole. As a developer community we're already hamstrung by the lackluster (or totally absent, depending on how you look at it) cross-platform availability for the.NET framework and culture that leans more corporate/enterprise. The least we can do is provide a basic, sustainable development tools for learners and free/open projects.
To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months. The 90 day requirement is to have a page publicly documenting their progress.
That said, I'm still curious whether agencies can move fast enough to get something like this done in even 12 months. =P
Without disagreeing with the substance of your post ($1 billion does seem like a lot for what it is), in principle things like notoriety/brand recognition, patents, and existing user base all are worth money, much more than whatever time it would take for a competitor to build an identical system from scratch.
>>We are supposed to be believers in evolution, right? If you don't like my term of 'defect' for someone who takes themselves out of the gene pool please supply a better term.
Many species have non-reproductive members that not only endure but are actually essential to the communities / species / gene pool that they are in. I suspect you might need less belief in evolution and more discernment into the subtleties of how it works in practice over large volumes of individuals and time. In a state of nature, your neighbors very likely contain most or all of the genes you singularly express, in certain configurations it would be advantageous for you to die or otherwise not contribute to reproduction directly if it allows the greater community to procreate -- spreading your genes through themselves rather than through you.
Also, genetics and social policy are tangential at best.
It depends on what kind of content, it seems like. Drawing has a lot of potential and people have been quite successful with it. It looks like music is shaping up to be useful as well. I find it very useful for short note taking and task management, though not great for something like writing a 10 page paper. Gauging from the note taking applications, I imagine making presentation decks or component diagrams is would be something to try.
There's nothing stopping you from watching porn on your iPad. Maybe what you're trying to say is that there is no native application that will stream porn due to the app store's policies?
There's a big gap between the former and the latter. I don't have any native applications on my desktop to watch streaming porn either. I either use my browser (which an iPad has) or I use a media player to watch saved files, which can be done with iTunes or other video players on the iPad. The whole iTunes ecosystem actually makes it very easy to have podcasts and porn sync'ed without any extra work. The closest thing to not being able to watch porn on the iPad is lack of Flash, but in the case of video there are apps to deal with that too.
It would be simpler if you just said "I don't like Apple" or whatever your personal stance is, rather than throwing pasta at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Right, because if Apple had everything built and assembled in the US, we definitely would have people like you instead complaining about how expensive Apple products are.
I'm married, my spouse is smart and and hot, and our first date was spent talking about Civ III vs Civ IV and different strategies we've tried. In the early days of the relationship we'd have Sci-fi Friday date nights. We've been together more than five years at this point, our biggest issues are things like rolling our eyes when we catch each other watching guilty pleasures Batman Beyond or Smallville... which is then changed to mutually acceptable shows like Firefly or Battlestar.
Did you ever think maybe, just maybe, there are so many divorced and unhappy couples because all of the pretense and hiding of who you are and what your interests are bites you in the ass? Do you think maybe you'd be happier with someone who is actually intrigued, understanding, or maybe even shares some of your interests that make you different from the other random people s/he could be on a date with?
I understand that there are some things you don't bring out on the first date because there's no establishment of trust yet and there's so little information to go on that little pieces of data might disproportionally color their impression of you. But come on, there are so many movies and adult-targeted tv shows based off of comic books, video gaming has gone so mainstream that you'd think one of the world's biggest problems was the advent of casual gaming, sci-fi and fantasy in general has become something relatively common place in prime time entertainment. Grow a pair and be yourself and find someone who will actually like that about you!
Setting aside Apple TV portion of this thread for a moment, I think you've missed some recent happenings in the Mac space. The last few revisions of the iMac hardware have definitely had a focus on gaming performance. And no, this doesn't mean they have a good price-to-performance ratio, but it does mean some people on the fence (like me) can now at least consider the trade-off when it was previously not a viable option.
In terms of general ecosystem, the increase of gaming performance is also echoed in Parallels' and Fusion's focus on gaming optimizations in their latest versions. I expect the hardware refocus also in part led to Steam's migration to the Mac platform. Finally, the Mac App store does have "real games" on it and they are selling; it's not just Angry Birds HD.
Circling back on the Apple TV, I think media/blogs are making a mountain out of a molehill, and we're all pointing to the mountain and saying "Oh Apple, you're so stupid, this isn't a mountain." I would be surprised if apps didn't appear on the Apple TV, and as we've seen in both the iPhone and iPad, apps directly lead to people making games. That doesn't suggest that it will compete directly with the PS3/XBox/Wii systems, or that Apple is even trying to. It's just the spread of the application eco-system.
I very seriously doubt that this is where we are heading in the short or mid-term. I know it's fun to speculate on worst-case scenarios, there haven't been any indications so far that OS X is being groomed to be locked down. Apple has continued to treat the Macintosh as the center of the Apple ecosystem (hell one of the big techie complaints about the iPad is that it requires a computer to set up and that it is not a stand-alone device).
If something like this were to happen, I think it is much more likely that it would take the form of the Mac App Store being sufficiently popular with Mac users that it's just not practical to sell software outside of it as the user base has become blind to it. (This is more or less what what intellitech was talking about) While that is in effect the same situation you're talking about, in that case it would be the users who essentially decided (with their wallets) that is how they prefer to acquire applications, not something that was imposed on users or developers by Apple itself.
I think that's a fair concern, but I'm a little skeptical. There were similar concerns about Steam being a go-Steam-or-go-home platform for game developers, but so far it's been that the major players decide for themselves if they want to use it and it's been a boon for indie game developers who might never have the attention of potential buyers.
There are going to be plenty of firmly-established OS X application developers that are not going to want to use the Mac App Store because they want/prefer their own purchasing platform or can't provide their software within the requirements of a Mac Store Application (system modifications, OS integration, etc). I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe was one of them; despite the tiff over Flash, they are important to the customer base for their other tools.
Even assuming they want to, Apple isn't going be able to tell them to play ball or go home. As long as that door is open, the Mac Store will be the go to place for general consumer applications (convenience, price) and independent development (exposure, low entry point).
That's not an analogous situation though.
In the case of iOS, you can only install an application if it's available in the iOS App Store (ignoring jail breaking and such, of course). The only way around that would be to have a web application, which in many ways is a poor substitute for having a native app.
But in the case of OS X, you can still install/build any application you'd like. It's not as though using Steam prevents you from buying Starcraft II from Blizzard. In fact, the Mac App Store model is explicitly meant for types of applications that don't have to make system changes or integrate with the OS, something entire classes of desktop applications need to be able to do. Unlike iOS, this isn't attempting to be the only avenue for application installation, it's simply meant to be convenient. (can use your Apple ID, download and update your apps through one central location, develop and distribute paid applications without having to have your own purchasing infrastructure, etc)
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I find Spanish the least helpful language to know, personally. I've always lived in east coast urban US. I'm a native English speaker and know a little Spanish and one of my parents is off-the-boat Colombian (she speaks perfect English and lost a lot of her Spanish since she was a kid, so very little carried over to me). But frankly anywhere I have traveled where Spanish is prevalent, in our out of the US, English and one year of high school Spanish is more than enough to get by.
I basically only ever speak Spanish with native Spanish speakers for fun, very rarely because it was particularly useful. Getting by with English among Spanish speakers is a lot more about being patient and gracious: ask them if they speak English, thank them for speaking English, etc. BTW to my fellow Americans, that applies anywhere.
As an adult who does travel quite a bit and wants to learn a third language, I tried to approach this as an optimization problem. While by population Mandarin is high on the list, it's not very prevalent outside of China. When I realized sheer population wasn't going to be a helpful way to look at it, I started looking at the numbers of countries and both their primary and secondary languages. If you ignore English, it turns out that German, Italian, and French start looking really helpful... not for speaking in Germany, France, or Italy, but in the most number of other places that don't necessarily have a lot of English speakers. I'm opting for French, personally, but I couldn't find any real reason to pick one over the other.
But to the OP's question, if s/he is not planning to travel and is specifically asking about programming, I have never needed anything other than English while programming, ever. At that point I'd say, you clearly have an itch to learn a language, learn whatever language you want to learn.
Man, I hope you're a troll
Look, I was wanking daily by the time I was 12, I had access to porn years before that (probably at 8 or 9), and by that I mean magazines -- physical printed porn. This was before having internet in a household was common place, and I was one of the good kids (never had disciplinary problems, had to be home by 9:30pm, etc etc) and was a relatively late bloomer compared to my peers. Kids making out at parties started at 10ish. My first pregnant classmate was at 13. I'm currently healthy, married, MIT CS degree, successful career, not a single damned bad thing happened to me from having access to porn at 8 nor could anything short of living in North Korea or Alpha Complex have stopped me.
If you think this has any impact, even a little, on your 13 year old, you are completely delusional. At 13 they've already had as much access to it as they want to have. As for younger kids, if they're old enough to change the setting, they're old enough to find dozens of other ways to get at it, of which several won't even involve a computer. A better question would be how much alcohol or weed your 13 year old is going to have access to, if he doesn't already. Hint: Many of the honors/AP juniors/seniors do one or both regularly. Trust me.
Let's be fair here for a minute. "Here's a handful of rabid crazy vociferous bloggers with crazy opinions that will make an awesome headline that gets lots of page views" is very different from "random normal people whose primary use for their smartphone is to track and share recipes with relatives". Most news is news entertainment and is not a reflection of what sane normal people say and do. I assure you, real life iPhone users don't give a shit about Android phones and probably wouldn't even be able to tell you a single device that even uses it (*mumble mumble* Galaxy EVO Ice Cream *mumble mumble*), and the same goes true for Android users (*mumble mumble* iPhone 5GS II Turbo with Hyperfighting *mumble mumble*).
That depends on your definition of average, mathematically speaking that's not true. What percent of numbers are below average in this set: {1, 1, 1, 1, 1000}
This isn't pedantry, this is a meaningful distinction: I expect the amount of good software is extremely outnumbered by the bad, and even good software developers can be forced into kludges by time pressures, bad team culture, etc. I don't see any reason to think that code quality globally resembles a normal curve.
Yea that's not what this was though, this was a marketing term and they started pushing it very early. Similarly technical documentation for developers refers to it all as Metro, if they were going to change that because it's not the real name, they would have done it before it went RTM.
Consider this: they have no other name for it. "Aero" is still "Aero", but "Metro" is now "Windows-8 style UI".
What in the hell is an "or vagina"? Is that new hardware slang for an OR gate?
Maybe it's Microsoft's new OR-V framework: Object Relational Vagina (ORV)
I am not sure what you mean. The .NET Express IDEs are truly, 100% free. Software you write with it is yours and can be sold or made open source.
Okay, wanking about whether or not people have entitlement issues is missing the core of the situation.
There are developers that will be new to .NET development, and there will be developers that have already been developing desktop applications against the Express versions of the software. If we have learned nothing from the gaming console or phone platform wars, it is that you want to encourage application development. Any barrier to entry or project sustainability, even one that is merely perceived, will cause some number of people to pick a different platform to learn and grow on, and the .NET ecosystem will shrink. There are plenty of other languages and IDEs to turn to that are free, easy, and reliably maintained without having to worry about version-ed crippleware.
I am a full-time .NET developer. I'm an MSDN subscriber and so am utterly independent of the Express versions. Yet I feel very strongly that incidents like this hurt me and hurt .NET development on the whole. As a developer community we're already hamstrung by the lackluster (or totally absent, depending on how you look at it) cross-platform availability for the .NET framework and culture that leans more corporate/enterprise. The least we can do is provide a basic, sustainable development tools for learners and free/open projects.
To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months. The 90 day requirement is to have a page publicly documenting their progress.
That said, I'm still curious whether agencies can move fast enough to get something like this done in even 12 months. =P
Anecdotally, everyone I know from college still has the same political leanings they had.
More importantly, we're fooling ourselves to think the differences between the DNC and RNC are how much money they spend.
Without disagreeing with the substance of your post ($1 billion does seem like a lot for what it is), in principle things like notoriety/brand recognition, patents, and existing user base all are worth money, much more than whatever time it would take for a competitor to build an identical system from scratch.
I think that's just nitpicking at a detail that's entirely irrelevant.
Welcome to politics!
So? That means he getting laid, which is more than anyone can say for you coward.
The ability or desire for memorization does not imply intelligence.
>>We are supposed to be believers in evolution, right? If you don't like my term of 'defect' for someone who takes themselves out of the gene pool please supply a better term. Many species have non-reproductive members that not only endure but are actually essential to the communities / species / gene pool that they are in. I suspect you might need less belief in evolution and more discernment into the subtleties of how it works in practice over large volumes of individuals and time. In a state of nature, your neighbors very likely contain most or all of the genes you singularly express, in certain configurations it would be advantageous for you to die or otherwise not contribute to reproduction directly if it allows the greater community to procreate -- spreading your genes through themselves rather than through you. Also, genetics and social policy are tangential at best.
Somewhere, Ed Tufte just puked and has no idea why. Poor guy.
Straight from the article: "The IDC and Gartner PC sales figures do not include tablets"
It depends on what kind of content, it seems like. Drawing has a lot of potential and people have been quite successful with it. It looks like music is shaping up to be useful as well. I find it very useful for short note taking and task management, though not great for something like writing a 10 page paper. Gauging from the note taking applications, I imagine making presentation decks or component diagrams is would be something to try.
There's nothing stopping you from watching porn on your iPad. Maybe what you're trying to say is that there is no native application that will stream porn due to the app store's policies?
There's a big gap between the former and the latter. I don't have any native applications on my desktop to watch streaming porn either. I either use my browser (which an iPad has) or I use a media player to watch saved files, which can be done with iTunes or other video players on the iPad. The whole iTunes ecosystem actually makes it very easy to have podcasts and porn sync'ed without any extra work. The closest thing to not being able to watch porn on the iPad is lack of Flash, but in the case of video there are apps to deal with that too.
It would be simpler if you just said "I don't like Apple" or whatever your personal stance is, rather than throwing pasta at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Right, because if Apple had everything built and assembled in the US, we definitely would have people like you instead complaining about how expensive Apple products are.
I'm married, my spouse is smart and and hot, and our first date was spent talking about Civ III vs Civ IV and different strategies we've tried. In the early days of the relationship we'd have Sci-fi Friday date nights. We've been together more than five years at this point, our biggest issues are things like rolling our eyes when we catch each other watching guilty pleasures Batman Beyond or Smallville... which is then changed to mutually acceptable shows like Firefly or Battlestar.
Did you ever think maybe, just maybe, there are so many divorced and unhappy couples because all of the pretense and hiding of who you are and what your interests are bites you in the ass? Do you think maybe you'd be happier with someone who is actually intrigued, understanding, or maybe even shares some of your interests that make you different from the other random people s/he could be on a date with?
I understand that there are some things you don't bring out on the first date because there's no establishment of trust yet and there's so little information to go on that little pieces of data might disproportionally color their impression of you. But come on, there are so many movies and adult-targeted tv shows based off of comic books, video gaming has gone so mainstream that you'd think one of the world's biggest problems was the advent of casual gaming, sci-fi and fantasy in general has become something relatively common place in prime time entertainment. Grow a pair and be yourself and find someone who will actually like that about you!
Setting aside Apple TV portion of this thread for a moment, I think you've missed some recent happenings in the Mac space. The last few revisions of the iMac hardware have definitely had a focus on gaming performance. And no, this doesn't mean they have a good price-to-performance ratio, but it does mean some people on the fence (like me) can now at least consider the trade-off when it was previously not a viable option.
In terms of general ecosystem, the increase of gaming performance is also echoed in Parallels' and Fusion's focus on gaming optimizations in their latest versions. I expect the hardware refocus also in part led to Steam's migration to the Mac platform. Finally, the Mac App store does have "real games" on it and they are selling; it's not just Angry Birds HD.
Circling back on the Apple TV, I think media/blogs are making a mountain out of a molehill, and we're all pointing to the mountain and saying "Oh Apple, you're so stupid, this isn't a mountain." I would be surprised if apps didn't appear on the Apple TV, and as we've seen in both the iPhone and iPad, apps directly lead to people making games. That doesn't suggest that it will compete directly with the PS3/XBox/Wii systems, or that Apple is even trying to. It's just the spread of the application eco-system.
Except that what you just sited is explicitly disallowed by the Apple iPhone App Store developer agreement (or at least it was recently).
No it's not disallowed as of September 2010 (it came up in April 2010)
I very seriously doubt that this is where we are heading in the short or mid-term. I know it's fun to speculate on worst-case scenarios, there haven't been any indications so far that OS X is being groomed to be locked down. Apple has continued to treat the Macintosh as the center of the Apple ecosystem (hell one of the big techie complaints about the iPad is that it requires a computer to set up and that it is not a stand-alone device).
If something like this were to happen, I think it is much more likely that it would take the form of the Mac App Store being sufficiently popular with Mac users that it's just not practical to sell software outside of it as the user base has become blind to it. (This is more or less what what intellitech was talking about) While that is in effect the same situation you're talking about, in that case it would be the users who essentially decided (with their wallets) that is how they prefer to acquire applications, not something that was imposed on users or developers by Apple itself.
I think that's a fair concern, but I'm a little skeptical. There were similar concerns about Steam being a go-Steam-or-go-home platform for game developers, but so far it's been that the major players decide for themselves if they want to use it and it's been a boon for indie game developers who might never have the attention of potential buyers.
There are going to be plenty of firmly-established OS X application developers that are not going to want to use the Mac App Store because they want/prefer their own purchasing platform or can't provide their software within the requirements of a Mac Store Application (system modifications, OS integration, etc). I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe was one of them; despite the tiff over Flash, they are important to the customer base for their other tools.
Even assuming they want to, Apple isn't going be able to tell them to play ball or go home. As long as that door is open, the Mac Store will be the go to place for general consumer applications (convenience, price) and independent development (exposure, low entry point).
That's not an analogous situation though. In the case of iOS, you can only install an application if it's available in the iOS App Store (ignoring jail breaking and such, of course). The only way around that would be to have a web application, which in many ways is a poor substitute for having a native app. But in the case of OS X, you can still install/build any application you'd like. It's not as though using Steam prevents you from buying Starcraft II from Blizzard. In fact, the Mac App Store model is explicitly meant for types of applications that don't have to make system changes or integrate with the OS, something entire classes of desktop applications need to be able to do. Unlike iOS, this isn't attempting to be the only avenue for application installation, it's simply meant to be convenient. (can use your Apple ID, download and update your apps through one central location, develop and distribute paid applications without having to have your own purchasing infrastructure, etc)