"... could soon find itself on an intersecting path..." "One small orbital perturbation and that whole radioactive mess could miss the Sun and come swinging back to make a meteor shower you really wouldn't want to get too close to."
Why do people always conflate possibility with probability? I "could" win the state lottery while simultaneously getting struck by lightning, but the odds of that happening are (forgive me) astronomical.
Heck, it's hard enough to get close to Venus or Mercury when you're trying to do on purpose. Care to calculate the odds of getting close enough to a planet to affect the orbit to the point where it's going to miss the sun and then come back out to intersect a point on a circle 82 billion miles long, at the same exact instant in time we just happen to be there?
I could point to quite a few studies that refute each and every one of your anti-green Fox News talking points, but I'll let you do the work. Google is your friend. I know you're in Texas and that makes getting a real education difficult, but you could at least try...
"Many people choose to buy a hybrid mainly or solely based on the higher mileage ratings and therefore the savings in fuel costs. Assuming that maintenance costs are otherwise the same (which they may or may not actually be, according to other comments here), the hybrid has a higher initial price plus battery replacement costs."
Translation: "Many people" means I don't know for sure, but I know some guy who said that, so let's assume it's true for "many" people. "Assuming that," is more assumptions, but at least you called it as such. "...the hybrid has a higher initial price..." True. "...plus battery replacement costs..." Again, assuming that every owner will in fact have to replace the battery. Statistically false to fact.
"Depending on your exact situation, a hybrid could be penny-wise (saving a few bucks in gas each week) but pound-foolish (spending thousands extra to get the hybrid)."
With the bias, obviously, leaning towards the "pound-foolish" side of the fence. Tell me, do you always stack the deck when you play cards?
"... have an unknown maintenance factor, and gas isn't really that expensive..."
Try again. The first Prius shipped in 2001, 11 years ago. The maintenance factors are pretty well known.
And gas may not be "that" expensive at the moment (where were you two years ago?), but if most of us drove a hybrid we'd save billions collectively, and cut foreign oil imports by about 40% (making a pretty large dent in our trade deficit). Plus it would be a lot less likely that we'd to need to spend trillions cavorting around in places like the Middle East.
Each and every gallon of "not that expensive" gas we burn contributes to our worsening domestic situation...
"Agreed, mid-40s in miles per US gallon is pathetic indeed. I drive a diesel Mercedes C stationwagon (similar in size to the Prius V), and average at least 55mpg (US gallons) in our usual mix of driving..."
Apples to oranges. With diesel here in the US you're also paying about 19% more in fuel costs over gasoline. Adjust your numbers downward by 20% to compensate for the more expensive fuel, and that 55mpg is about equal to 44mpg. Just pathetic...
Or to put it another way: your diesel 55mpg and his gasoline-based 44mpg would cost each of you about the same per 100 miles travelled. TANSTAAFL.
Doing it just because I can "recoup my investment" short term is stupid. Throwing away a large batch of hard won customers is stupid. If I had made a successful ad-supported app with Google Translate, what do I do my customer base disappears because Google closed the APIs? They already had one app from "my" company break. Think they're going to buy another?
Way, way too many companies -- and individuals -- make decisions based on short-term profits, with little to no regard of the long-term impact. That "I'm going to get mine and screw everyone else" sense of entitlement is largely how we got to be in our current mess.
Well... is it useless, or just bad? Or not the way you tend to do things? Or only 90% of the solution? Or does it work, but lacking in the eye candy department?
"Hence non-competes. I always scrawl 'I don't agree' on the signature line just to keep my options open, never been noticed."
Thanks for the tip. I'll now check signatures, just to weed out sneaky assholes who'd almost certainly end up being more trouble than they're worth. (grin)
Seriously, if you want to state your reservations up front, I'll listen and do my best to accommodate them. But I've found that people who "cheat" in one area rarely have any morals or compunctions against cheating in others. You're either trustworthy, or you're not.
One more thing... just because they never said anything doesn't mean that it was never noticed. Funny how people who cheat always seem to think that they are the ones outsmarting the system...
"But as raises have been completely shut down for all non C-level people, what's the point of going beyond the scope? "
So, knowing this, why go beyond that scope in the first place? It sounds to me that you wrote a program that would make your own life easier. Having done so, you expect them to pay for it, even though writing it was outside of your job description and even though it was neither asked nor demanded.
And I'm with several of the others. If I had an employee who was always careful never anything more than necessary, or who would never do anything not spelled out on his job description, then that employee would soon be looking for another job. He's the one that's exploiting the situation, and the employer.
A good employer-employee relationship is symbiotic, not adversarial.
"No one in their right mind would put malicious code into something where anyone can find it, and if they did, it wouldn't last long in the wild."
Assumptions. You assume that the code is somehow tagged with malicious comments, perhaps?
If I were a government, and I REALLY wanted to hack into systems, I'd have some people join a few OSS projects and have them inject my code into the system. A specific unchecked buffer here or there would probably go unnoticed up to and until the point where it was needed.
"... and if they did, it wouldn't last long in the wild."
As pointed out above, it might last long enough...
I find this sort of thing rather amusing. You didn't trust closed source software...
So you download ten million or so lines of source code from some anonymous server, written by thousands of people you've never met and will never know. You then build it using even more software and libraries and tools running under yet another OS, and you then install it on hardware with its own BIOS and roms and controllers.
Hundreds of millions of lines of code you've never seen, and never will see...
And yet the end product of THAT result is somehow more trustworthy.
"But devices like the EEE Transformer have been very successful."
Chortle. That's as good as Amazon stating that the Kindle is a "bestseller." In the first three quarters of 2011 non-iPad tablet sales stood at about 10% of the total (Apple 90%). ASUS had 10% of the 10%, or in other words, Apple outsold the "very successful" EEE 100-to-1.
"... but if the company cares it definitely can be done..."
Simplistic answer. It's not whether or not they care. Do they have the expertise? Do they design by committee, with everyone and their kid bother sticking their opinion into the mix? Do they have the time? Do they have the money?
The later two boil down to commitment? HP looked at what it would take to compete in the marketplace, and threw in the towel.
"Granted it was refined and the wheel was new, but the database driven UI had already been done."
Nice dismissal that completely disregards the issue. Yes, a couple of devices existed that had "database-driven" UIs... that sucked. One player basically had a d-pad that required you to click each time to advance the "cursor" to the next item in your list.
Got 1,000 songs? That's 1,000 clicks. The accelerated click wheel changed the game.
The Diamond Rio PMP300 (1998 ) held 32MB of flash memory which held ONE hour of music, ran for 8 - 12 hours, and cost $200. The Creative NOMAD Jukebox weighed nearly a pound with it's 2.5" 6GB drive, ran for an astounding 4 hours on it's NiCad battery, and retailed for $500.
The original iPod had a 1.8" 5GB drive, the scroll wheel, ran for 10 hours on it's LiPo battery, weighed 6.5 oz, and cost $399. The UI and the form and the functionality all combined to make it a killer device.
"But what I see nowadays are UIs where you have click/swipe, _WAIT_ for fancy animation, click again, _WAIT_ for fancy animation, then only finally get what you want."
Baloney. He mentions the window minimization thing, but that's rendered by the GPU and you don’t have to sit there and watch it, you know? Just click and go to the next thing. And his OS X menu rendering animation was playing at, what, 1/100th speed? It happens in the blink of an eye on my MBP.
As it happens, I agree with the skeuomorphic interface choices, but it seems Apple is listening there, too. The latest version of iBooks on the iPad adds a “clean” mode that allows you to dump the fake book binding and pages.
"Pros break cameras because they are dodging an airborne motorcycle, a out of control rally car, or is getting punched by a over zealous body guard for a prima donna rock star. "
And here I thought "pros" bought F2s, F3s, F4s, and 1Ds because they're built to take the kind of abuse that would smash a consumer/prosumer-grade camera into itty-bitty camera parts. Sort of like what seems to be happening to yours...
"Apple certainly aren't going to make two sizes...."
Depends on how you look at it, I guess. Won't Apple probably drop the 3GS and sell the 4 / 4S as the inexpensive models when the 5 ships? Just like they do now with the 3GS / 4 / 4S lineup.
"This is why I'm not buying a "smart" phone until until they release one with a fully open software stack (excluding the little bit of firmware that controls the cellular modem.)"
You do realize, of course, that your dumb phone ALSO has a processor and software inside of it? You realize that your carrier already has access to all of your calls and texts? That they already have access to your location thanks to 911 location services?
Your illusion that your dumb phone is any safer... AT ALL... is just that. An illusion...
"Would you really know it if AT&T had some code buried in the kernel that sends your tracking data in some GSM control messages that aren't accessible in user-land on the phone?"
"Some of their services are completely legal, some are in the gray area... but you can get it done by someone for about $100."
So... we don't trust the carrier. So we should go to some anonymous person who specializes in proving services in the "gray" areas, and trust THEM to install a perfectly clean version of Android on your phone, thus eliminating all spyware and rootkits.
Slashdot Mirror
"... could soon find itself on an intersecting path..." "One small orbital perturbation and that whole radioactive mess could miss the Sun and come swinging back to make a meteor shower you really wouldn't want to get too close to."
Why do people always conflate possibility with probability? I "could" win the state lottery while simultaneously getting struck by lightning, but the odds of that happening are (forgive me) astronomical.
Heck, it's hard enough to get close to Venus or Mercury when you're trying to do on purpose. Care to calculate the odds of getting close enough to a planet to affect the orbit to the point where it's going to miss the sun and then come back out to intersect a point on a circle 82 billion miles long, at the same exact instant in time we just happen to be there?
I could point to quite a few studies that refute each and every one of your anti-green Fox News talking points, but I'll let you do the work. Google is your friend. I know you're in Texas and that makes getting a real education difficult, but you could at least try...
"Many people choose to buy a hybrid mainly or solely based on the higher mileage ratings and therefore the savings in fuel costs. Assuming that maintenance costs are otherwise the same (which they may or may not actually be, according to other comments here), the hybrid has a higher initial price plus battery replacement costs."
Translation: "Many people" means I don't know for sure, but I know some guy who said that, so let's assume it's true for "many" people. "Assuming that," is more assumptions, but at least you called it as such. "...the hybrid has a higher initial price..." True. "...plus battery replacement costs..." Again, assuming that every owner will in fact have to replace the battery. Statistically false to fact.
"Depending on your exact situation, a hybrid could be penny-wise (saving a few bucks in gas each week) but pound-foolish (spending thousands extra to get the hybrid)."
With the bias, obviously, leaning towards the "pound-foolish" side of the fence. Tell me, do you always stack the deck when you play cards?
"... have an unknown maintenance factor, and gas isn't really that expensive ..."
Try again. The first Prius shipped in 2001, 11 years ago. The maintenance factors are pretty well known.
And gas may not be "that" expensive at the moment (where were you two years ago?), but if most of us drove a hybrid we'd save billions collectively, and cut foreign oil imports by about 40% (making a pretty large dent in our trade deficit). Plus it would be a lot less likely that we'd to need to spend trillions cavorting around in places like the Middle East.
Each and every gallon of "not that expensive" gas we burn contributes to our worsening domestic situation...
"Agreed, mid-40s in miles per US gallon is pathetic indeed. I drive a diesel Mercedes C stationwagon (similar in size to the Prius V), and average at least 55mpg (US gallons) in our usual mix of driving..."
Apples to oranges. With diesel here in the US you're also paying about 19% more in fuel costs over gasoline. Adjust your numbers downward by 20% to compensate for the more expensive fuel, and that 55mpg is about equal to 44mpg. Just pathetic...
Or to put it another way: your diesel 55mpg and his gasoline-based 44mpg would cost each of you about the same per 100 miles travelled. TANSTAAFL.
I think there's a clear and distinct difference between an "Open" API and a "Public" API.
Doing it just because I can "recoup my investment" short term is stupid. Throwing away a large batch of hard won customers is stupid. If I had made a successful ad-supported app with Google Translate, what do I do my customer base disappears because Google closed the APIs? They already had one app from "my" company break. Think they're going to buy another?
Way, way too many companies -- and individuals -- make decisions based on short-term profits, with little to no regard of the long-term impact. That "I'm going to get mine and screw everyone else" sense of entitlement is largely how we got to be in our current mess.
"A useless app is entirely useless."
Well... is it useless, or just bad? Or not the way you tend to do things? Or only 90% of the solution? Or does it work, but lacking in the eye candy department?
Like bad coffee, a bad app is still an app.
"Hence non-competes. I always scrawl 'I don't agree' on the signature line just to keep my options open, never been noticed."
Thanks for the tip. I'll now check signatures, just to weed out sneaky assholes who'd almost certainly end up being more trouble than they're worth. (grin)
Seriously, if you want to state your reservations up front, I'll listen and do my best to accommodate them. But I've found that people who "cheat" in one area rarely have any morals or compunctions against cheating in others. You're either trustworthy, or you're not.
One more thing... just because they never said anything doesn't mean that it was never noticed. Funny how people who cheat always seem to think that they are the ones outsmarting the system...
"But as raises have been completely shut down for all non C-level people, what's the point of going beyond the scope? "
So, knowing this, why go beyond that scope in the first place? It sounds to me that you wrote a program that would make your own life easier. Having done so, you expect them to pay for it, even though writing it was outside of your job description and even though it was neither asked nor demanded.
And I'm with several of the others. If I had an employee who was always careful never anything more than necessary, or who would never do anything not spelled out on his job description, then that employee would soon be looking for another job. He's the one that's exploiting the situation, and the employer.
A good employer-employee relationship is symbiotic, not adversarial.
"No one in their right mind would put malicious code into something where anyone can find it, and if they did, it wouldn't last long in the wild."
Assumptions. You assume that the code is somehow tagged with malicious comments, perhaps?
If I were a government, and I REALLY wanted to hack into systems, I'd have some people join a few OSS projects and have them inject my code into the system. A specific unchecked buffer here or there would probably go unnoticed up to and until the point where it was needed.
"... and if they did, it wouldn't last long in the wild."
As pointed out above, it might last long enough...
I find this sort of thing rather amusing. You didn't trust closed source software...
So you download ten million or so lines of source code from some anonymous server, written by thousands of people you've never met and will never know. You then build it using even more software and libraries and tools running under yet another OS, and you then install it on hardware with its own BIOS and roms and controllers.
Hundreds of millions of lines of code you've never seen, and never will see...
And yet the end product of THAT result is somehow more trustworthy.
Right.
"Which raises the question, why the need to fix it? Didn't they have any QA or user testing at all?"
Can you say, "rushed to ship for the Christmas shopping season," boys and girls?
I knew that you could.
"But devices like the EEE Transformer have been very successful."
Chortle. That's as good as Amazon stating that the Kindle is a "bestseller." In the first three quarters of 2011 non-iPad tablet sales stood at about 10% of the total (Apple 90%). ASUS had 10% of the 10%, or in other words, Apple outsold the "very successful" EEE 100-to-1.
"... but if the company cares it definitely can be done..."
Simplistic answer. It's not whether or not they care. Do they have the expertise? Do they design by committee, with everyone and their kid bother sticking their opinion into the mix? Do they have the time? Do they have the money?
The later two boil down to commitment? HP looked at what it would take to compete in the marketplace, and threw in the towel.
"Granted it was refined and the wheel was new, but the database driven UI had already been done."
Nice dismissal that completely disregards the issue. Yes, a couple of devices existed that had "database-driven" UIs... that sucked. One player basically had a d-pad that required you to click each time to advance the "cursor" to the next item in your list.
Got 1,000 songs? That's 1,000 clicks. The accelerated click wheel changed the game.
The Diamond Rio PMP300 (1998 ) held 32MB of flash memory which held ONE hour of music, ran for 8 - 12 hours, and cost $200. The Creative NOMAD Jukebox weighed nearly a pound with it's 2.5" 6GB drive, ran for an astounding 4 hours on it's NiCad battery, and retailed for $500.
The original iPod had a 1.8" 5GB drive, the scroll wheel, ran for 10 hours on it's LiPo battery, weighed 6.5 oz, and cost $399. The UI and the form and the functionality all combined to make it a killer device.
"But what I see nowadays are UIs where you have click/swipe, _WAIT_ for fancy animation, click again, _WAIT_ for fancy animation, then only finally get what you want."
Baloney. He mentions the window minimization thing, but that's rendered by the GPU and you don’t have to sit there and watch it, you know? Just click and go to the next thing. And his OS X menu rendering animation was playing at, what, 1/100th speed? It happens in the blink of an eye on my MBP.
As it happens, I agree with the skeuomorphic interface choices, but it seems Apple is listening there, too. The latest version of iBooks on the iPad adds a “clean” mode that allows you to dump the fake book binding and pages.
"... throws away 30 years of office app development..."
You say this like it's a bad thing... (grin)
"Pros break cameras because they are dodging an airborne motorcycle, a out of control rally car, or is getting punched by a over zealous body guard for a prima donna rock star. "
And here I thought "pros" bought F2s, F3s, F4s, and 1Ds because they're built to take the kind of abuse that would smash a consumer/prosumer-grade camera into itty-bitty camera parts. Sort of like what seems to be happening to yours...
"I mean the iPods. Only one of which - the iPod touch - had a touchscreen."
What about the new touchscreen on the iPod nano? It's not an iOS device, but it IS an iPod, and it DOES have a touch screen.
"Apple certainly aren't going to make two sizes...."
Depends on how you look at it, I guess. Won't Apple probably drop the 3GS and sell the 4 / 4S as the inexpensive models when the 5 ships? Just like they do now with the 3GS / 4 / 4S lineup.
"This is why I'm not buying a "smart" phone until until they release one with a fully open software stack (excluding the little bit of firmware that controls the cellular modem.)"
You do realize, of course, that your dumb phone ALSO has a processor and software inside of it? You realize that your carrier already has access to all of your calls and texts? That they already have access to your location thanks to 911 location services?
Your illusion that your dumb phone is any safer... AT ALL... is just that. An illusion...
"Would you really know it if AT&T had some code buried in the kernel that sends your tracking data in some GSM control messages that aren't accessible in user-land on the phone?"
How do you know that ANY phone is not doing that?
And who knows what else added back in...
"Some of their services are completely legal, some are in the gray area... but you can get it done by someone for about $100."
So... we don't trust the carrier. So we should go to some anonymous person who specializes in proving services in the "gray" areas, and trust THEM to install a perfectly clean version of Android on your phone, thus eliminating all spyware and rootkits.
Hilarious.