I took a friend of mine who has never been around guns to the range yesterday, mainly because they didn't believe me about a revolver vs a semi auto pistol. Her position was that black semi-auto pistols had to go, but revolvers were fine. They were "old west guns".
For this i had my Walther PPS with a 6 round magazine vs a 6 shot S&W.38 revolver. Both go bang everytime I pull the trigger. In fact if I pull the trigger and it doesn't go bang on the revolver I just pull the trigger again (and had it happen once yesterday). PPS if I pull the trigger and it fails to go bang it's an instant action drill to clear. And with a speed loader it isn't that much slower to reload than the semi auto. (About 4 seconds vs 2 with the semi auto mainly because I'm a southpaw and need to practice speed loading my revolver more).
Then I got out the AR and M1 Garand. She was shocked I could fire and reload the M1 Garand just as fast with 8 round stripper clips as the AR with 30 round magazines. In fact it's a little easier to reload the M1 for me as a south paw than the AR.
I was on a project last year where the two firms ended up getting a pre-paid NetJet share because we were having to fly all over the place to support installations across the country. When you are flying teams of 4 - 6 it worked out to be about the same as commercial tickets, but usually we could leave early in the morning, get the job done, and were back that evening. If we flew commercial it was usually 2 - 3 days out of the office as it's normally take a day to fly to the destination between security checks, layovers, weather delays, then a day on site, and a third day for the return trip. If you factor in those lost days of work, it turned out to be a lot cheaper.
We don't fly very much, most of our relatives live within a 6 hour car trip, but I've looked at it before to charter a jet for family travel to the coasts. If 6 people are going it usually works out to be about $50 a person more than commercial. And again not having to waste a day dealing with security and other hassles it's almost worth it.
Usually when I am coding something I have some task that needs to be done. Often it's something that is thrown together using CPAN modules, but the end result is something that gets the job done. Could it have been done better or more efficient in another language or by a better programmer? Probably. But honestly for most tasks today computing power isn't a problem or near the expense time is. I'm still surprised at the fact that some of our core scripts and programs we use are things I put together years ago in as little as an afternoon. But they ain't broke so no one bother to "fix it".
1) If you get the least bit motion sick, don't go see it at the high frame frate in 3D. Normally I don't, even when seeing IMAX/OMNIMAX, but this film I did.
2) The 48 frames per second and 3d makes certain parts of the film like watching a live stage production. The problem then becomes with the post production. There were a lot of scenes when you could tell the background was composited and with so much CGI some of it was like going back and watching CGI from 15 years ago.
That was one of things I liked about the LOTR movies and especially by the third movie, the CGI had gotten so good that it was largely seamless. You didn't notice it, it was just part of the story. In this one I noticed it and often found myself cringing.
I had the 100MBs charter business line into my house up until a year ago for work (sold my company so they were no longer paying for it) and went to their standard 30mbs connection. I was never hosting any servers, but was involved on a large software project that transferred several gigs of data each day doing repo pulls and pushes, etc.. What I found wasn't that I was having connection problems on my end, but it was the servers that I was connecting to which seemed to be the bottle neck. I tested this from the main office which had a 100Mbs fiber line and found much the same that the most the remote servers we were using would allow us to pull was about 5MB/s sustained. I used to stream movies/tv from hulu on my iPad while waiting for code to download/upload and sometimes while playing my XBox all at the same time. Bandwidth never seemed to be a problem.
Even now on the 30Mb/s connection I don't really notice any problems even if other people are over and using their computers/iPads/Phones and whatnot.
I think the problem with Cable in general is a lot depends on how many users are on your line. I know for a fact that I am one of two houses on this line with cable internet. And the other house on the street is currently unoccupied while being renovated. Everyone else switched to Direct TVa couple years ago and are older and don't use the internet.
Until about 2015 then the mint people will have "lost their way" and then some other distro will become the new hotness. This has been one of the major problems with Linux on the desktop and why it will never be a major player in that space. When any distro starts to have any traction suddenly it suffers a backlash from the "linux community". I've seen it now with Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE, Gentoo, Mandrake, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint will be next.
Exactly. I play a couple MMO's. In fact I let my XBL subscription lapse as I found that I could have more fun playing some of the Free-2-Play games and spending $20 a month on in game currency or a subscription to get stuff rather than spending $60 every few weeks for a new XBox game that usually I got tired of in a few days.
But I don't expect it to last forever. I view it as no different than going to a movie or to a bar both of which I'd spend $20 or more every time I go rather than $20 a month for probably around 20 - 60 hours of entertainment depending on the time of year and free time I have.
This. I was at a MS event on the Win 8 developers track and the presenter discussed this at how it is basically to maintain one code base between Windows 8 (Desktop/x86) and WinRT for Surface and Phone. I expect there to be some differences like I don't expect the desktop to have a GPS built in like on a phone, but the differences in the API go beyond that like trying to access the media API for sound between the two are different. I sat there at the presentation basically shaking my head thinking "WTF?".
I keep looking at all these projections of if we increase taxes on the wealthy how it will generate at most 20% of the revenue we need to close the fiscal gap. That tells me we aren't taxing our way out of this mess and while the increased taxes may help some, it's not going to be nearly enough. Spending needs an across the board massive cut on everything from defense to social spending. That's the ugly truth nobody wants to discuss.
If I didn't know better I'd think both sides wants this fiscal cliff to happen. It's the only way I think they can actually enact the needed cuts and tax increases while both sides blame each other...
It's not the calculation that's the problem. There are already several services that offer sales tax tables for the US. I know, we used one in a point of sale application at the last company I worked for and it cost us about $12,500 a year for a license (IIRC). The problem for a small business is the accounting nightmare of having to keep your books straight an ensuring each state gets paid its due. After I sold that last company I started buying vintage and antique furniture from estate sales and opened a small private, sale by appointment only showroom. I sell some local, but a lot of my sales are to larger dealers and customers out of the area. I probably spend between 5 - 10 hours a month doing book work now. Mostly I have to keep extremely good records incase I audited by the state sales tax because of my $90k in sales this year, only about 20% of it was to local residents which I collected taxes on. The rest were out of state purchases from my website, mostly to other dealers. In my state I get to keep a percentage of the sales tax "to cover the costs of collecting for the state". But if a law like this gets passed suddenly am I going to have to know the taxing laws for every state? Right now my accounting is simple enough I have to pay a CPA $800 to review my end of year statements to ensure that I deducted what I thought I could and to provide some protection against IRS Audit. If something like this got passed I have a feeling that would turn into $800 a month. Well that's about $10,000 in accounting costs a year added to my business. Okay, I did $90,000 in sales, but my inventory cost me around $35,000. Rent, utilities, insurance, travel, hiring movers for some of the items, marketing expenses was about another $15,000. Add in another $10,000 in accounting fees plus the added time plus hassles and it makes me start to wonder if I really want to keep doing this or not.
We have a model for this, one that has existed for well over 100 years dealing with catalog companies. After all really what is the difference between a catalog company and an online retailer other than dead tree vs. electronic. The law states you only have to collect taxes in the states in which you have a physical presence in. I live in Missouri and if I have an online store, incorporated in Missouri, and have all my operations in Missouri I have to collect sales tax on Missouri purchases. If I sell to you in New York, Illinois, Kansas, Washington, I don't collect the taxes. Now some states have "use tax" but that responsibility is on the buyer, not the seller. To give you an example, many years ago if you bought a Dell computer online or over the phone they wouldn't charge you sales taxes. But then you'd usually get a tax bill for the computer from the state a few weeks later.
At a previous occupation we had an E-Commerce and Point of Sale solution. Most of our clients were small businesses with between one and five locations and usually within the same state, but we were getting more interest from some larger companies and looked at how to deal with the taxing side. Because we felt it was only a matter of time before some kind of Internet Sales tax was levied.
There are companies that sell sales tax tables and update them usually every 30 days for the approx. 11,000 taxing jurisdictions in the United Sates. But even then with things like TIF's, the taxes collected on one side of the street might be different from the other side of the same street. That is where the mess comes into play.
If things keep going that's exactly what is going to happen at the federal level. We're going to to wake up one day and congress is probably going to say, "Well no more money, too bad. You all are SOL. We sold you a bill of goods all those years ago. I mean it sounded so good back in the 1930's when most people were dead by age 65."
I mean when the government fails to honor it's contracts whom do you turn to? What recourse do you really have?
I was at a Microsoft event earlier this week and there was a session on design for Windows 8 across the various platforms and it answered a lot of questions I had been scratching my head about. It's clear over the next few years that Microsoft is aiming to design a single UI across all of it's platforms from Phone, to Desktops, to tablets, to TV. They want it to all be the same experience. Part of that is the expectation that going forward devices will all have touch screens from the phone to the desktop. They want to fundamentally change how all applications function to their new model, which from a purely design perspective has some merits. It's also I think banking on the idea that websites as we think of them today are going away being replaced by single use apps.
Problem is it's their new design philosophy is completely different from what people have come to expect. For instance, Windows 8 Metro apps are to scroll horizontal instead of vertical. (unless it's a phone app then it's vertical). Tool bars are supposed to go off screen until you use some kind of mouse/keyboard/touch gesture. Don't include functionality in your app that can be done by another app via contracts. And that is going to through a lot of people who aren't creative types, especially businesses. Most people get into their routine and don't want change. And the fact it's going to be a while, if ever, before existing applications update to this new design guidelines. So it's going to be a disjointed experience between old and new for a couple years.
Apple figured out that while iOS and OSX share many of the same technical underpinnings, they made the UI and design standards different. The desktop functions the same way OSX has for the past 10 years and iOS is different. People don't expect OSX to behave like iOS and vice versa.
Android really only has to worry about mobile devices with tablets and phones being their only two product lines.
Microsoft had a chart: there are about 700M Windows 7 devices and within x months they expect there will be 500M Windows 8 devices. Android's number was around 350M devices and Apple about 200M devices. (Now there are some problems there because what counts as "Android". I mean Kindle devices run a version of Android, but not exactly as they have their own SDK etc. So does that still count as "android". Also Android is starting to show up on other devices such as cameras and I'd imagine inside of TV's before long.)
This laptop I walked in and said "I want one with the non-glare display". Processor speed, ram, etc were things I found I didn't really care about (I was going to go to Crucial and max it out aftermarket anyway). The applications I'm running most of the time are Xcode, Visual Studio, and Eclipse (yes it is a MacBook Pro).
Hell I got home and had to open up the hardware screen just to see what I had bought (Quad Core i7).
Not sure if it's any different with Apple TV, but one year I bought the MLB.tv subscription so I could watch games on my computer and at the time iPhone if I was traveling. Problem was if I try watching a St. Louis Cardinals game in St. Louis it was blacked out. What's the point in getting the sports subscription if I can't watch the home town team without a blackout. I'm not sure if that's changed or not, but that was one of the biggest reasons why I stuck with my Cable TV subscription was I like to watch Cardinals Baseball in the summer and Blues hockey in the winter.
My previous TV was older with no internet connection and I ended up using my Xbox that last year or so more to stream netflix then actually play video games. When that TV died last year and I bought a new one, the new TV had a dozen services built in including Netflix and Hulu. Since then I actually let my XBL subscription lapse because I just didn't use it enough. If the idea works, what is to stop Panasonic/LG/Samsung et al from basically building similar services directly into the TV. My current TV is still wired into the home network, but I'm seeing a lot more TV's with built in Wifi.
My Cable bundle contract expires at the end of the year and I'm seriously debating whether or not it's time to cancel the TV subscription.
It's this kind of attitude of unions in the US which makes me say most have outlived their usefulness and something I had to explain when I lived in Germany to the Europeans that the union in the US are nothing like the unions in Europe. Many of the unions in the US are basically racketeers with a bully complex. In Europe if jobs had to be lost, usually the Union would step in and help provide those members with job training to find a new job. If that's what unions did in the US, I'd probably be more supportive.
What union really thinks that it's better for a company to go out of business and everyone in the union lose their job than to try and save as many as possible? Because a union worker making $0 isn't contributing any dues.
When the hostess brand gets bought, do the unions think the new owners are going to do? Maybe they'll keep the old benefits, but only hire back half the workers.
I've been writing mobile apps for about three years now and a lot depends on your target market. If you are creating a paid apps and a small shop then you want to go iOS first. The first two apps I did had a free version with ads and a paid version with no ads and additional features (basically version 2.0). I had more downloads on Android of the free version by about 2.5 to 1 vs iOS. But iOS made up 90% of my paid revenue. While Android provided 70% of the ad revenue at first it suddenly leveled off and began to decline. I ignored it until one app got a bad review saying the software had malware and then found 3 more knock off apps all of which were spelled similar to mine and of suspect origin. Now these were niche apps with a few thousand paid downloads each on iOS. I originally built the apps to serve some need I was looking for and thought it might be worth $.99 to others. They were enough that it was a profitable hobby/moonlighting gig. Nothing that sold a million copies or anything like that.
Ironically I did release a couple of those apps for Amazon Kindle Fire, which is technically android, and made more money from the Kindle this year than I ever did generic android on the Google Marketplace. The app I'm working on today I'm going to release for iOS and the Kindle. I'm probably going to ignore Google Marketplace for now for my moonlighting apps.
And that's a problem I've found with Android and the same problem I had with linux about 10 - 15 years ago as in there are many different "flavors" of android. I use that term a little more loosely than with linux, but there are minor inconstancies from the different manufactures mostly having to do with hardware vs. the location of library files that made linux such a PITA back then. I know there will be fan boys screaming, "But if you design your app right it will run on anything." at which point I figure these people have never dealt with clients who are marketing departments. On the paid app development side of the house we offer this thing called Quality Assurance as part of the contract. I know people can laugh about it as much as they want to, but it's there and some clients are looking for pixel perfect (don't worry we charge them for it). First year we tried to keep up with android and lost our shirt buying hardware for testing. Now it's "Will work on stock android for latest nexus phone & tablet".
That's generally why when my shop charges for development it's $X for all iOS devices, $X * ($X*.15) for Kindle, and $X+($X*.75) for android, and then we charge anywhere from $1000 - $3500 per additional android device for QA.
But the biggest annoyance I had with android on the personal projects was the fact of having to maintain different build branches for different Android versions vs 1 build branch for iOS no matter what iDevice(s) the end product would be shipping for. That's started to change now, but at one time if you "supported Android" that meant making sure it worked on 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 3.0 as all were in the wild. I know that's far less today as Android's release schedule has grown a little more sane than the every six months with a new release that was going on a couple years ago.
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I took a friend of mine who has never been around guns to the range yesterday, mainly because they didn't believe me about a revolver vs a semi auto pistol. Her position was that black semi-auto pistols had to go, but revolvers were fine. They were "old west guns".
For this i had my Walther PPS with a 6 round magazine vs a 6 shot S&W .38 revolver. Both go bang everytime I pull the trigger. In fact if I pull the trigger and it doesn't go bang on the revolver I just pull the trigger again (and had it happen once yesterday). PPS if I pull the trigger and it fails to go bang it's an instant action drill to clear. And with a speed loader it isn't that much slower to reload than the semi auto. (About 4 seconds vs 2 with the semi auto mainly because I'm a southpaw and need to practice speed loading my revolver more).
Then I got out the AR and M1 Garand. She was shocked I could fire and reload the M1 Garand just as fast with 8 round stripper clips as the AR with 30 round magazines. In fact it's a little easier to reload the M1 for me as a south paw than the AR.
I was on a project last year where the two firms ended up getting a pre-paid NetJet share because we were having to fly all over the place to support installations across the country. When you are flying teams of 4 - 6 it worked out to be about the same as commercial tickets, but usually we could leave early in the morning, get the job done, and were back that evening. If we flew commercial it was usually 2 - 3 days out of the office as it's normally take a day to fly to the destination between security checks, layovers, weather delays, then a day on site, and a third day for the return trip. If you factor in those lost days of work, it turned out to be a lot cheaper.
We don't fly very much, most of our relatives live within a 6 hour car trip, but I've looked at it before to charter a jet for family travel to the coasts. If 6 people are going it usually works out to be about $50 a person more than commercial. And again not having to waste a day dealing with security and other hassles it's almost worth it.
Usually when I am coding something I have some task that needs to be done. Often it's something that is thrown together using CPAN modules, but the end result is something that gets the job done. Could it have been done better or more efficient in another language or by a better programmer? Probably. But honestly for most tasks today computing power isn't a problem or near the expense time is. I'm still surprised at the fact that some of our core scripts and programs we use are things I put together years ago in as little as an afternoon. But they ain't broke so no one bother to "fix it".
The W3C announced a finalized HTML5 Spec. Yep it's the end of the world.
I stopped using blender a few years ago as I loved it as a hobby, but the ui radically changed every 6 months. I eventually went back to light wave.
And two things I have to say:
1) If you get the least bit motion sick, don't go see it at the high frame frate in 3D. Normally I don't, even when seeing IMAX/OMNIMAX, but this film I did.
2) The 48 frames per second and 3d makes certain parts of the film like watching a live stage production. The problem then becomes with the post production. There were a lot of scenes when you could tell the background was composited and with so much CGI some of it was like going back and watching CGI from 15 years ago.
That was one of things I liked about the LOTR movies and especially by the third movie, the CGI had gotten so good that it was largely seamless. You didn't notice it, it was just part of the story. In this one I noticed it and often found myself cringing.
I had the 100MBs charter business line into my house up until a year ago for work (sold my company so they were no longer paying for it) and went to their standard 30mbs connection. I was never hosting any servers, but was involved on a large software project that transferred several gigs of data each day doing repo pulls and pushes, etc.. What I found wasn't that I was having connection problems on my end, but it was the servers that I was connecting to which seemed to be the bottle neck. I tested this from the main office which had a 100Mbs fiber line and found much the same that the most the remote servers we were using would allow us to pull was about 5MB/s sustained. I used to stream movies/tv from hulu on my iPad while waiting for code to download/upload and sometimes while playing my XBox all at the same time. Bandwidth never seemed to be a problem.
Even now on the 30Mb/s connection I don't really notice any problems even if other people are over and using their computers/iPads/Phones and whatnot.
I think the problem with Cable in general is a lot depends on how many users are on your line. I know for a fact that I am one of two houses on this line with cable internet. And the other house on the street is currently unoccupied while being renovated. Everyone else switched to Direct TVa couple years ago and are older and don't use the internet.
Until about 2015 then the mint people will have "lost their way" and then some other distro will become the new hotness. This has been one of the major problems with Linux on the desktop and why it will never be a major player in that space. When any distro starts to have any traction suddenly it suffers a backlash from the "linux community". I've seen it now with Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE, Gentoo, Mandrake, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint will be next.
Exactly. I play a couple MMO's. In fact I let my XBL subscription lapse as I found that I could have more fun playing some of the Free-2-Play games and spending $20 a month on in game currency or a subscription to get stuff rather than spending $60 every few weeks for a new XBox game that usually I got tired of in a few days.
But I don't expect it to last forever. I view it as no different than going to a movie or to a bar both of which I'd spend $20 or more every time I go rather than $20 a month for probably around 20 - 60 hours of entertainment depending on the time of year and free time I have.
This. I was at a MS event on the Win 8 developers track and the presenter discussed this at how it is basically to maintain one code base between Windows 8 (Desktop/x86) and WinRT for Surface and Phone. I expect there to be some differences like I don't expect the desktop to have a GPS built in like on a phone, but the differences in the API go beyond that like trying to access the media API for sound between the two are different. I sat there at the presentation basically shaking my head thinking "WTF?".
I keep looking at all these projections of if we increase taxes on the wealthy how it will generate at most 20% of the revenue we need to close the fiscal gap. That tells me we aren't taxing our way out of this mess and while the increased taxes may help some, it's not going to be nearly enough. Spending needs an across the board massive cut on everything from defense to social spending. That's the ugly truth nobody wants to discuss.
If I didn't know better I'd think both sides wants this fiscal cliff to happen. It's the only way I think they can actually enact the needed cuts and tax increases while both sides blame each other...
It's not the calculation that's the problem. There are already several services that offer sales tax tables for the US. I know, we used one in a point of sale application at the last company I worked for and it cost us about $12,500 a year for a license (IIRC). The problem for a small business is the accounting nightmare of having to keep your books straight an ensuring each state gets paid its due. After I sold that last company I started buying vintage and antique furniture from estate sales and opened a small private, sale by appointment only showroom. I sell some local, but a lot of my sales are to larger dealers and customers out of the area. I probably spend between 5 - 10 hours a month doing book work now. Mostly I have to keep extremely good records incase I audited by the state sales tax because of my $90k in sales this year, only about 20% of it was to local residents which I collected taxes on. The rest were out of state purchases from my website, mostly to other dealers. In my state I get to keep a percentage of the sales tax "to cover the costs of collecting for the state". But if a law like this gets passed suddenly am I going to have to know the taxing laws for every state? Right now my accounting is simple enough I have to pay a CPA $800 to review my end of year statements to ensure that I deducted what I thought I could and to provide some protection against IRS Audit. If something like this got passed I have a feeling that would turn into $800 a month. Well that's about $10,000 in accounting costs a year added to my business. Okay, I did $90,000 in sales, but my inventory cost me around $35,000. Rent, utilities, insurance, travel, hiring movers for some of the items, marketing expenses was about another $15,000. Add in another $10,000 in accounting fees plus the added time plus hassles and it makes me start to wonder if I really want to keep doing this or not.
We have a model for this, one that has existed for well over 100 years dealing with catalog companies. After all really what is the difference between a catalog company and an online retailer other than dead tree vs. electronic. The law states you only have to collect taxes in the states in which you have a physical presence in. I live in Missouri and if I have an online store, incorporated in Missouri, and have all my operations in Missouri I have to collect sales tax on Missouri purchases. If I sell to you in New York, Illinois, Kansas, Washington, I don't collect the taxes. Now some states have "use tax" but that responsibility is on the buyer, not the seller. To give you an example, many years ago if you bought a Dell computer online or over the phone they wouldn't charge you sales taxes. But then you'd usually get a tax bill for the computer from the state a few weeks later.
At a previous occupation we had an E-Commerce and Point of Sale solution. Most of our clients were small businesses with between one and five locations and usually within the same state, but we were getting more interest from some larger companies and looked at how to deal with the taxing side. Because we felt it was only a matter of time before some kind of Internet Sales tax was levied.
There are companies that sell sales tax tables and update them usually every 30 days for the approx. 11,000 taxing jurisdictions in the United Sates. But even then with things like TIF's, the taxes collected on one side of the street might be different from the other side of the same street. That is where the mess comes into play.
No, but you need a bow tie to be the doctor...because bow ties are cool.
If things keep going that's exactly what is going to happen at the federal level. We're going to to wake up one day and congress is probably going to say, "Well no more money, too bad. You all are SOL. We sold you a bill of goods all those years ago. I mean it sounded so good back in the 1930's when most people were dead by age 65."
I mean when the government fails to honor it's contracts whom do you turn to? What recourse do you really have?
when there's a perl module for that:
http://search.cpan.org/~jgamble/Games-Maze-1.08/lib/Games/Maze.pm
I was at a Microsoft event earlier this week and there was a session on design for Windows 8 across the various platforms and it answered a lot of questions I had been scratching my head about. It's clear over the next few years that Microsoft is aiming to design a single UI across all of it's platforms from Phone, to Desktops, to tablets, to TV. They want it to all be the same experience. Part of that is the expectation that going forward devices will all have touch screens from the phone to the desktop. They want to fundamentally change how all applications function to their new model, which from a purely design perspective has some merits. It's also I think banking on the idea that websites as we think of them today are going away being replaced by single use apps.
Problem is it's their new design philosophy is completely different from what people have come to expect. For instance, Windows 8 Metro apps are to scroll horizontal instead of vertical. (unless it's a phone app then it's vertical). Tool bars are supposed to go off screen until you use some kind of mouse/keyboard/touch gesture. Don't include functionality in your app that can be done by another app via contracts. And that is going to through a lot of people who aren't creative types, especially businesses. Most people get into their routine and don't want change. And the fact it's going to be a while, if ever, before existing applications update to this new design guidelines. So it's going to be a disjointed experience between old and new for a couple years.
Apple figured out that while iOS and OSX share many of the same technical underpinnings, they made the UI and design standards different. The desktop functions the same way OSX has for the past 10 years and iOS is different. People don't expect OSX to behave like iOS and vice versa.
Android really only has to worry about mobile devices with tablets and phones being their only two product lines.
Microsoft had a chart: there are about 700M Windows 7 devices and within x months they expect there will be 500M Windows 8 devices. Android's number was around 350M devices and Apple about 200M devices. (Now there are some problems there because what counts as "Android". I mean Kindle devices run a version of Android, but not exactly as they have their own SDK etc. So does that still count as "android". Also Android is starting to show up on other devices such as cameras and I'd imagine inside of TV's before long.)
I can finally build that Bull Halsey Don't Sail Your Fleet into A Typhoon app I've always wanted to create!
This laptop I walked in and said "I want one with the non-glare display". Processor speed, ram, etc were things I found I didn't really care about (I was going to go to Crucial and max it out aftermarket anyway). The applications I'm running most of the time are Xcode, Visual Studio, and Eclipse (yes it is a MacBook Pro).
Hell I got home and had to open up the hardware screen just to see what I had bought (Quad Core i7).
Not sure if it's any different with Apple TV, but one year I bought the MLB.tv subscription so I could watch games on my computer and at the time iPhone if I was traveling. Problem was if I try watching a St. Louis Cardinals game in St. Louis it was blacked out. What's the point in getting the sports subscription if I can't watch the home town team without a blackout. I'm not sure if that's changed or not, but that was one of the biggest reasons why I stuck with my Cable TV subscription was I like to watch Cardinals Baseball in the summer and Blues hockey in the winter.
My previous TV was older with no internet connection and I ended up using my Xbox that last year or so more to stream netflix then actually play video games. When that TV died last year and I bought a new one, the new TV had a dozen services built in including Netflix and Hulu. Since then I actually let my XBL subscription lapse because I just didn't use it enough. If the idea works, what is to stop Panasonic/LG/Samsung et al from basically building similar services directly into the TV. My current TV is still wired into the home network, but I'm seeing a lot more TV's with built in Wifi.
My Cable bundle contract expires at the end of the year and I'm seriously debating whether or not it's time to cancel the TV subscription.
Until the participants begin turning up dead with small caliber gunshots to the back of the head.
It's this kind of attitude of unions in the US which makes me say most have outlived their usefulness and something I had to explain when I lived in Germany to the Europeans that the union in the US are nothing like the unions in Europe. Many of the unions in the US are basically racketeers with a bully complex. In Europe if jobs had to be lost, usually the Union would step in and help provide those members with job training to find a new job. If that's what unions did in the US, I'd probably be more supportive.
What union really thinks that it's better for a company to go out of business and everyone in the union lose their job than to try and save as many as possible? Because a union worker making $0 isn't contributing any dues.
When the hostess brand gets bought, do the unions think the new owners are going to do? Maybe they'll keep the old benefits, but only hire back half the workers.
I've been writing mobile apps for about three years now and a lot depends on your target market. If you are creating a paid apps and a small shop then you want to go iOS first. The first two apps I did had a free version with ads and a paid version with no ads and additional features (basically version 2.0). I had more downloads on Android of the free version by about 2.5 to 1 vs iOS. But iOS made up 90% of my paid revenue. While Android provided 70% of the ad revenue at first it suddenly leveled off and began to decline. I ignored it until one app got a bad review saying the software had malware and then found 3 more knock off apps all of which were spelled similar to mine and of suspect origin. Now these were niche apps with a few thousand paid downloads each on iOS. I originally built the apps to serve some need I was looking for and thought it might be worth $.99 to others. They were enough that it was a profitable hobby/moonlighting gig. Nothing that sold a million copies or anything like that.
Ironically I did release a couple of those apps for Amazon Kindle Fire, which is technically android, and made more money from the Kindle this year than I ever did generic android on the Google Marketplace. The app I'm working on today I'm going to release for iOS and the Kindle. I'm probably going to ignore Google Marketplace for now for my moonlighting apps.
And that's a problem I've found with Android and the same problem I had with linux about 10 - 15 years ago as in there are many different "flavors" of android. I use that term a little more loosely than with linux, but there are minor inconstancies from the different manufactures mostly having to do with hardware vs. the location of library files that made linux such a PITA back then. I know there will be fan boys screaming, "But if you design your app right it will run on anything." at which point I figure these people have never dealt with clients who are marketing departments. On the paid app development side of the house we offer this thing called Quality Assurance as part of the contract. I know people can laugh about it as much as they want to, but it's there and some clients are looking for pixel perfect (don't worry we charge them for it). First year we tried to keep up with android and lost our shirt buying hardware for testing. Now it's "Will work on stock android for latest nexus phone & tablet".
That's generally why when my shop charges for development it's $X for all iOS devices, $X * ($X*.15) for Kindle, and $X+($X*.75) for android, and then we charge anywhere from $1000 - $3500 per additional android device for QA.
But the biggest annoyance I had with android on the personal projects was the fact of having to maintain different build branches for different Android versions vs 1 build branch for iOS no matter what iDevice(s) the end product would be shipping for. That's started to change now, but at one time if you "supported Android" that meant making sure it worked on 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 3.0 as all were in the wild. I know that's far less today as Android's release schedule has grown a little more sane than the every six months with a new release that was going on a couple years ago.
I guess they can announce they are going to layoff 123,000 people now that the election is over.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/10/at-white-house-request-lockheed-martin-drops-plan-to-issue-layoff-notices/