You are right about the 30% cut. It seems like a lot. I wonder how much is left over after all the fees and the cost of running the App Store is factored in. I'm sure they're still making money, I just wonder how much.
However, there are ways to run OS X on non Apple hardware if that's what's stopping you.
Let me re-phrase. The degree to which the iPhone has been a success is in part due to the App store. My evidence? The fact that now Microsoft and Google have app stores. It is considered an essential part of a platform's "Ecosystem".
Why can't you just have different places supply different ratings, - maybe even specialize in certain types of app, but the apps themselves still come from the same store?
The reason the App store and perhaps even the iPhone itself was such a success is because there is only one place you need to go to find Apps. And although many on Slashdot complain about the "Walled Garden", having an App store run by Apple itself provides some assurance to the customer that the App is legit and not some form of malware.
Is it perfect in that regard? No.
I'm not sure. What revenue stream does the App store have? I mean other than the $99 annual developer fee. Is that what you meant? The developer tools themselves are free. I used to spend hundreds on development tools and upgrades so I guess I'm not bothered much by the $99. I can play around with the tools and creating apps as much as I want without spending a dime. It's only when I want to put an app on actual device that I need to spend the money.
It would inevitably lead to some developers of accusing Apple of playing favorites.
What they could do instead (or in addition) is allow 3rd parties to easily obtain information on the most recent submissions, upgrades, etc and let them supply users with information on what is new and noteworthy.
It's good for Apple to surface really valuable apps, but it's not their job to do the marketing for every developer nor to make sure that everyone turns a profit. They've made a huge change in the industry by making virtually all the apps available for a popular platform available from a single place. This has had both positive and negative effects on developers. It was great for awhile when there weren't that many developers and all it took to get your app in front of millions was to submit it. Now your app is competing with hundreds of thousands of others.
It could simply be that the market is saturated and no amount of App store revamping is really going to fix that.
How often does a company REALLY hire the best possible person for the position? I'd say the chances are pretty slim. They may very well hire somebody who ends up being successful, but that's not the same as the best.
Usually the way it works is that the person that gets hired is the one that the hiring manager likes the most out of the people they've interviewed. The people that get interviewed are the ones that HR/hiring manager liked out of the pool of people that applied.
There may have been highly qualified people that were eliminated at any step. I've seen managers throw out resumes because the name wasn't "American sounding". That's a more blatant case. Some of the more subtle cases occur because there is a tendency to hire people like yourself.
For example, I was nearly turned down for a position because they wanted someone with a masters degree. Why? Because the people running the business unit and doing the hiring had MBAs, not because anything about the job required a masters.
I would venture that in many cases where a white male is hired into a technical position, there are equally or better qualified non-whites out there some place. To find them, you may have to look in different places, - cast a wider net. My point is that making an effort to have a more diverse workforce DOES NOT mean you have to settle for less qualified people.
On the other hand, there is a definite shortage of women CS and engineering grads. There are lots of complex reasons for this. But it's worse than it used to be, - which means it can be better than it is now. Companies like Apple are big enough to help make that happen, but not overnight.
The problem isn't just fertilizers, it's also that runoff is fast-tracked into lakes, streams, and rivers that lead to the Gulf. If instead we restored some wetlands and allowed the rivers to move beyond their banks now and then rather than just making the banks taller, you wouldn't have so much water flowing into the Gulf at such a furious pace dragging a ton of silt with it. It would have time to be filtered naturally, replenish aquifers, and grow plants instead of it all ending up in the ocean.
As someone who has been in the field a long time now, I've learned not to judge programmer's talent so much on what they were taught or even what they're currently doing. It's how quickly they can pick up something new. And it's not alway about technology. It's also about being able to effectively grasp the subject matter that's the basis of the software you're developing.
My recommendation is to constantly challenge yourself to learn something new. If all your current CS work has been java based, then definitely it's time to expand beyond that, and not because there is anything wrong with java. I'd say the same thing if you had been using C++ instead.
To me you can make the same sort of argument about CS Grads never being exposed LISP/Scheme/Clojure. The problem is that a 4 year degree must include other things besides CS courses (which is good), but there is only so much time. You can't learn everything in 4 years which is why you must continue learning your entire career.
I'm willing to bet that the dude complaining about modern CS grads is woefully deficient themselves in some areas of CS that could they could really benefit from.
Forget the "Internet of Things" buzzwords for the moment and watch the video. In my line of work being able to interact with remote sensors is a huge time saver. There are proprietary devices which allow that already but they have their limitations. The biggest problem with home made solutions like using a Raspberry Pi and a Cell Modem (which this doesn't seem to solve), is powering them for an extended period on a battery.
QuickTime was pretty impressive when first introduced (if you had a powerful enough Mac). If he was one of the original developers, he's definitely got some talent.
The problem is that the mobile app market has become saturated and the price users are willing to pay for apps is so low. Getting rid of top lists may remove some perceived unfairness but it won't solve the fundamental problem (from the app developer perspective) of supply and demand.
I should probably back up a little. There are a couple of issues here, - generation and consumption. From my perspective, no matter how you generate it, our level of consumption is not sustainable. Solar, wind, and other renewables may be better than fossil fuels, but you can't tell me that there won't be negative environmental impacts from covering deserts in the Southwest with solar panels, transmitting half of the power to the North, - and losing 6% of that in the process.
We were able absorb the costs associated with transmission loses in the past because power generation was artificially cheap and we didn't make the generators pay for the environmental impacts. The other problem with transmitting power over long distances is that it ultimately creates more points of failure and a more fragile system.
In the US natural gas costs 60 cents per kWh, coal 95 cents per kWh, nuclear 96 cents per kWh, and solar 130 cents per kWh. They are not on par with each other. We wouldn't be having this discussion if they were.
When you consider the amount of power the US (and other parts of the world) consume, 6 to 7% is huge.
You have to remember that it's tough for solar to beat out traditional sources of power on cost alone even when there are no losses. You don't want to be throwing away 6% or 7% of what's generated by transmitting it to another region.
This is just a question. Transmission losses are significant. Why would you want to transmit small amounts of power over long distances anyway? Why not use it locally?
Knowing how far a car is behind you and how fast it is approaching can give you some idea whether or not you can move over to make a left turn. And as more electric cars end up on the roads, you may not always hear them coming depending on what other sources of noise there are. I frequently ride through an area near an airport. I'm not going to hear a car approaching over the roar of a plane taking off.
I'm not sure I'd trust it vs taking a look over my shoulder. That would be my main issue. I've tried various rear view mirrors and never much liked them. Too small a field of vision. Too much moving my head around to see what I wanted to see.
I'm not sure what your point is exactly. If by "look in the mirror" you mean that I'm paying for those externalities, I agree. We pay for them through higher taxes, higher health care and insurance costs, among other ways.
And for the record I don't mind spending money on necessary defense. I do have trouble with the idea of propping up unpopular leaders of questionable ethics in exchange for short term stability and cheap gas prices. You can argue that it's necessary but either way we still pay for it. It's still an additional cost related to fossil fuels.
If you're implying that I'm part of the problem as a customer of a utility that primarily generates power via fossil fuels, I'll remind you that most of us don't have a say in where our utilities get their power from, - which is why it is good that states like California gives breaks to those who want to generate their own power using solar energy. I'm not even blaming the utilities entirely. Many of them are trying to generate electricity using cleaner sources of power and spend significant money on energy efficiency programs.
I'll also add that I'm typing this on a laptop provided by a non-profit energy efficiency organization (along with a salary) in exchange for my services. A laptop that I transport to and from work... on a bike.
We subsidize other forms of power generation constantly buy forcing the public to pay for all the externalities. If the power companies had to pay for all the costs related to mining, drilling, transporting, and burning fossil fuels, renewables would make a lot more economic sense even without the incentives.
What has it really cost us to keep the oil flowing out of the Middle East? What about the environmental and health impacts of burning fossil fuels? Who is paying for that?
In a system with no property tax, there would be no disincentive to hoard property.
So? I apologize in advance; there is no way to say this politely; you can take your loaded term "hoard" as well as your consensus and your bowing and scraping to government, and stuff them. You started the name-calling when you characterized real property ownership as "hoarding".
If you get off on seeing people's wealth seized by force and redistributed, fine; viewpoints and opinions are the most basic rights everyone has. But if you give support and comfort to those doing the seizing, expect a little blowback.
Now, if you want to get to basics and discuss the pros and cons of allowing private ownership of what is called "real property" (basically land) in the first place, that is fair game.
I don't think istartedi was characterizing property ownership as hoarding at all. Hoarding would be buying up a ton of property with no intent to do anything with it. This would drive up property costs for anyone else wanting to buy in the area. Without property taxes, one or two people with enough capital could buy up most of the land in a region and then charge of whatever they felt like to other potential buyers. Or they could basically price things out of anybody's reach and rent out the property instead, - again at inflated rates. Any land that sits idle costs them nothing anyway so there's no disincentive to hold on to it.
Where property taxes can be problematic are when people on living fixed incomes. Rising property taxes shouldn't be allowed to force anyone off a property that they've had for decades.
A community provides benefits to those who own property there, - whether its schools, police/fire service, or whatever. Those things need to be paid for somehow.
Unfortunately I've seen first hand all to many times that some people automatically just play the minority card each time to avoid ever having to make an effort to help themselves. The only reason they still do it is because it works thanks to most white men having already been programmed to feel socially guilty for everyone elses failures by a society with a screwed up socialist agenda like yours.
So some people playing the minority card means that there aren't any talented minorities out there that are being held back by their circumstances?
You know what I have seen first hand? A hiring manager rejecting a resume solely based on the ethnicity of the name of applicant. In fact they had rejected several resumes for exactly the same reason. I couldn't believe that this stuff still happens but it does. And that's just an overt case. I'm sure minorities are passed over for more subtle reasons that have little or nothing to do with their actual qualifications.
Once I was literally told to think long and hard before offering a job to a black candidate we were interviewing by somebody who wasn't even involved in the interview process. This was for a business unit of a larger organization that prided itself on its diversity record. When I first started working in that unit I'd actually been a little surprised at how lily white the staff was compared to my previous job in the company. After awhile it became very clear that it wasn't exactly an accident.
Aren't all youth cultures in the US part of the society as a whole? Doesn't one culture affect another? To me these things are all related, - all connected. You can't simply say that the problem is for the parents and kids of minority communities to fix, - although it's a very convenient solution to suggest for those outside of those communities. And also I can't think of any parent who doesn't want their child to achieve academically. You may have young peers who value other skills more, - regardless of ethnicity.
As to Facebook's concern those are legit as well. Don't you ever get spam from a non-english speaker trying to get you to do something or another and entirely missing the mark? They do so because they don't understand the language and the culture enough. Same with Facebook or anyone of these companies trying to appeal to a wide audience. It's not that I can't write software for any particular audience but I'm smart enough to know that what appeals to me and people like me may not appeal to people living under different circumstances or different cultures.
Have you ever considered that our whole approach to developing software has been largely created by white men? Perhaps that's part of the reason so few outside that group do it.
I happen to have a phone number at work that is almost identical to the one people call for energy assistance. I get calls on a regular basis from people who can't pay the gas bill or electric bill. Do you think they can afford DSL?
Every company I've ever worked for at the very top level of management says all the right things. At the same time I've personally witnessed hiring practices that excluded people who didn't fit the mold, - some applications being rejected based solely on fact the applicant's name wasn't "American" enough. The latter was for a technical position. I reported it and soon left. I doubt much was done because the hiring manager was on the fast track to move up in that organization.
I don't think a company's level of diversity has to exactly match the larger community's but clearly the numbers at these tech firms are completely lopsided. I'm not blaming them necessarily but yes I think they could and should do more. That doesn't mean hiring people who aren't qualified but it might mean doing more than looking at the pool of applicants that comes to you, you may have to find them. For example, they could start apprenticeship programs to train people with potential rather than only choosing from among those who could afford college.
On the bright side many of these same companies are promoting programs to get a more diverse pool of people into the necessary academic training.
If we as a society don't do these things, zip code, ethnicity, and even gender will play too a large a role in determining who becomes a "have" vs a "have not"
Slashdot Mirror
You are right about the 30% cut. It seems like a lot. I wonder how much is left over after all the fees and the cost of running the App Store is factored in. I'm sure they're still making money, I just wonder how much.
However, there are ways to run OS X on non Apple hardware if that's what's stopping you.
Let me re-phrase. The degree to which the iPhone has been a success is in part due to the App store. My evidence? The fact that now Microsoft and Google have app stores. It is considered an essential part of a platform's "Ecosystem".
You are right of course. I missed the obvious.
Why can't you just have different places supply different ratings, - maybe even specialize in certain types of app, but the apps themselves still come from the same store?
The reason the App store and perhaps even the iPhone itself was such a success is because there is only one place you need to go to find Apps. And although many on Slashdot complain about the "Walled Garden", having an App store run by Apple itself provides some assurance to the customer that the App is legit and not some form of malware.
Is it perfect in that regard? No.
I'm not sure. What revenue stream does the App store have? I mean other than the $99 annual developer fee. Is that what you meant? The developer tools themselves are free. I used to spend hundreds on development tools and upgrades so I guess I'm not bothered much by the $99. I can play around with the tools and creating apps as much as I want without spending a dime. It's only when I want to put an app on actual device that I need to spend the money.
It would inevitably lead to some developers of accusing Apple of playing favorites.
What they could do instead (or in addition) is allow 3rd parties to easily obtain information on the most recent submissions, upgrades, etc and let them supply users with information on what is new and noteworthy.
It's good for Apple to surface really valuable apps, but it's not their job to do the marketing for every developer nor to make sure that everyone turns a profit. They've made a huge change in the industry by making virtually all the apps available for a popular platform available from a single place. This has had both positive and negative effects on developers. It was great for awhile when there weren't that many developers and all it took to get your app in front of millions was to submit it. Now your app is competing with hundreds of thousands of others.
It could simply be that the market is saturated and no amount of App store revamping is really going to fix that.
How often does a company REALLY hire the best possible person for the position? I'd say the chances are pretty slim. They may very well hire somebody who ends up being successful, but that's not the same as the best.
Usually the way it works is that the person that gets hired is the one that the hiring manager likes the most out of the people they've interviewed. The people that get interviewed are the ones that HR/hiring manager liked out of the pool of people that applied.
There may have been highly qualified people that were eliminated at any step. I've seen managers throw out resumes because the name wasn't "American sounding". That's a more blatant case. Some of the more subtle cases occur because there is a tendency to hire people like yourself.
For example, I was nearly turned down for a position because they wanted someone with a masters degree. Why? Because the people running the business unit and doing the hiring had MBAs, not because anything about the job required a masters.
I would venture that in many cases where a white male is hired into a technical position, there are equally or better qualified non-whites out there some place. To find them, you may have to look in different places, - cast a wider net. My point is that making an effort to have a more diverse workforce DOES NOT mean you have to settle for less qualified people.
On the other hand, there is a definite shortage of women CS and engineering grads. There are lots of complex reasons for this. But it's worse than it used to be, - which means it can be better than it is now. Companies like Apple are big enough to help make that happen, but not overnight.
The problem isn't just fertilizers, it's also that runoff is fast-tracked into lakes, streams, and rivers that lead to the Gulf. If instead we restored some wetlands and allowed the rivers to move beyond their banks now and then rather than just making the banks taller, you wouldn't have so much water flowing into the Gulf at such a furious pace dragging a ton of silt with it. It would have time to be filtered naturally, replenish aquifers, and grow plants instead of it all ending up in the ocean.
As someone who has been in the field a long time now, I've learned not to judge programmer's talent so much on what they were taught or even what they're currently doing. It's how quickly they can pick up something new. And it's not alway about technology. It's also about being able to effectively grasp the subject matter that's the basis of the software you're developing.
My recommendation is to constantly challenge yourself to learn something new. If all your current CS work has been java based, then definitely it's time to expand beyond that, and not because there is anything wrong with java. I'd say the same thing if you had been using C++ instead.
To me you can make the same sort of argument about CS Grads never being exposed LISP/Scheme/Clojure. The problem is that a 4 year degree must include other things besides CS courses (which is good), but there is only so much time. You can't learn everything in 4 years which is why you must continue learning your entire career.
I'm willing to bet that the dude complaining about modern CS grads is woefully deficient themselves in some areas of CS that could they could really benefit from.
Forget the "Internet of Things" buzzwords for the moment and watch the video. In my line of work being able to interact with remote sensors is a huge time saver. There are proprietary devices which allow that already but they have their limitations. The biggest problem with home made solutions like using a Raspberry Pi and a Cell Modem (which this doesn't seem to solve), is powering them for an extended period on a battery.
QuickTime was pretty impressive when first introduced (if you had a powerful enough Mac). If he was one of the original developers, he's definitely got some talent.
The problem is that the mobile app market has become saturated and the price users are willing to pay for apps is so low. Getting rid of top lists may remove some perceived unfairness but it won't solve the fundamental problem (from the app developer perspective) of supply and demand.
I should probably back up a little. There are a couple of issues here, - generation and consumption. From my perspective, no matter how you generate it, our level of consumption is not sustainable. Solar, wind, and other renewables may be better than fossil fuels, but you can't tell me that there won't be negative environmental impacts from covering deserts in the Southwest with solar panels, transmitting half of the power to the North, - and losing 6% of that in the process.
We were able absorb the costs associated with transmission loses in the past because power generation was artificially cheap and we didn't make the generators pay for the environmental impacts. The other problem with transmitting power over long distances is that it ultimately creates more points of failure and a more fragile system.
In the US natural gas costs 60 cents per kWh, coal 95 cents per kWh, nuclear 96 cents per kWh, and solar 130 cents per kWh. They are not on par with each other. We wouldn't be having this discussion if they were.
When you consider the amount of power the US (and other parts of the world) consume, 6 to 7% is huge.
Between 6% and 7% is not significant?
You have to remember that it's tough for solar to beat out traditional sources of power on cost alone even when there are no losses. You don't want to be throwing away 6% or 7% of what's generated by transmitting it to another region.
This is just a question. Transmission losses are significant. Why would you want to transmit small amounts of power over long distances anyway? Why not use it locally?
Knowing how far a car is behind you and how fast it is approaching can give you some idea whether or not you can move over to make a left turn. And as more electric cars end up on the roads, you may not always hear them coming depending on what other sources of noise there are. I frequently ride through an area near an airport. I'm not going to hear a car approaching over the roar of a plane taking off.
I'm not sure I'd trust it vs taking a look over my shoulder. That would be my main issue. I've tried various rear view mirrors and never much liked them. Too small a field of vision. Too much moving my head around to see what I wanted to see.
I'm not sure what your point is exactly. If by "look in the mirror" you mean that I'm paying for those externalities, I agree. We pay for them through higher taxes, higher health care and insurance costs, among other ways.
And for the record I don't mind spending money on necessary defense. I do have trouble with the idea of propping up unpopular leaders of questionable ethics in exchange for short term stability and cheap gas prices. You can argue that it's necessary but either way we still pay for it. It's still an additional cost related to fossil fuels.
If you're implying that I'm part of the problem as a customer of a utility that primarily generates power via fossil fuels, I'll remind you that most of us don't have a say in where our utilities get their power from, - which is why it is good that states like California gives breaks to those who want to generate their own power using solar energy. I'm not even blaming the utilities entirely. Many of them are trying to generate electricity using cleaner sources of power and spend significant money on energy efficiency programs.
I'll also add that I'm typing this on a laptop provided by a non-profit energy efficiency organization (along with a salary) in exchange for my services. A laptop that I transport to and from work... on a bike.
We subsidize other forms of power generation constantly buy forcing the public to pay for all the externalities. If the power companies had to pay for all the costs related to mining, drilling, transporting, and burning fossil fuels, renewables would make a lot more economic sense even without the incentives.
What has it really cost us to keep the oil flowing out of the Middle East? What about the environmental and health impacts of burning fossil fuels? Who is paying for that?
So? I apologize in advance; there is no way to say this politely; you can take your loaded term "hoard" as well as your consensus and your bowing and scraping to government, and stuff them. You started the name-calling when you characterized real property ownership as "hoarding".
If you get off on seeing people's wealth seized by force and redistributed, fine; viewpoints and opinions are the most basic rights everyone has. But if you give support and comfort to those doing the seizing, expect a little blowback.
Now, if you want to get to basics and discuss the pros and cons of allowing private ownership of what is called "real property" (basically land) in the first place, that is fair game.
I don't think istartedi was characterizing property ownership as hoarding at all. Hoarding would be buying up a ton of property with no intent to do anything with it. This would drive up property costs for anyone else wanting to buy in the area. Without property taxes, one or two people with enough capital could buy up most of the land in a region and then charge of whatever they felt like to other potential buyers. Or they could basically price things out of anybody's reach and rent out the property instead, - again at inflated rates. Any land that sits idle costs them nothing anyway so there's no disincentive to hold on to it.
Where property taxes can be problematic are when people on living fixed incomes. Rising property taxes shouldn't be allowed to force anyone off a property that they've had for decades.
A community provides benefits to those who own property there, - whether its schools, police/fire service, or whatever. Those things need to be paid for somehow.
Unfortunately I've seen first hand all to many times that some people automatically just play the minority card each time to avoid ever having to make an effort to help themselves. The only reason they still do it is because it works thanks to most white men having already been programmed to feel socially guilty for everyone elses failures by a society with a screwed up socialist agenda like yours.
So some people playing the minority card means that there aren't any talented minorities out there that are being held back by their circumstances?
You know what I have seen first hand? A hiring manager rejecting a resume solely based on the ethnicity of the name of applicant. In fact they had rejected several resumes for exactly the same reason. I couldn't believe that this stuff still happens but it does. And that's just an overt case. I'm sure minorities are passed over for more subtle reasons that have little or nothing to do with their actual qualifications.
Once I was literally told to think long and hard before offering a job to a black candidate we were interviewing by somebody who wasn't even involved in the interview process. This was for a business unit of a larger organization that prided itself on its diversity record. When I first started working in that unit I'd actually been a little surprised at how lily white the staff was compared to my previous job in the company. After awhile it became very clear that it wasn't exactly an accident.
Aren't all youth cultures in the US part of the society as a whole? Doesn't one culture affect another? To me these things are all related, - all connected. You can't simply say that the problem is for the parents and kids of minority communities to fix, - although it's a very convenient solution to suggest for those outside of those communities. And also I can't think of any parent who doesn't want their child to achieve academically. You may have young peers who value other skills more, - regardless of ethnicity.
As to Facebook's concern those are legit as well. Don't you ever get spam from a non-english speaker trying to get you to do something or another and entirely missing the mark? They do so because they don't understand the language and the culture enough. Same with Facebook or anyone of these companies trying to appeal to a wide audience. It's not that I can't write software for any particular audience but I'm smart enough to know that what appeals to me and people like me may not appeal to people living under different circumstances or different cultures.
Have you ever considered that our whole approach to developing software has been largely created by white men? Perhaps that's part of the reason so few outside that group do it.
http://www.tidesport.org/racia...
I happen to have a phone number at work that is almost identical to the one people call for energy assistance. I get calls on a regular basis from people who can't pay the gas bill or electric bill. Do you think they can afford DSL?
Every company I've ever worked for at the very top level of management says all the right things. At the same time I've personally witnessed hiring practices that excluded people who didn't fit the mold, - some applications being rejected based solely on fact the applicant's name wasn't "American" enough. The latter was for a technical position. I reported it and soon left. I doubt much was done because the hiring manager was on the fast track to move up in that organization.
I don't think a company's level of diversity has to exactly match the larger community's but clearly the numbers at these tech firms are completely lopsided. I'm not blaming them necessarily but yes I think they could and should do more. That doesn't mean hiring people who aren't qualified but it might mean doing more than looking at the pool of applicants that comes to you, you may have to find them. For example, they could start apprenticeship programs to train people with potential rather than only choosing from among those who could afford college.
On the bright side many of these same companies are promoting programs to get a more diverse pool of people into the necessary academic training.
If we as a society don't do these things, zip code, ethnicity, and even gender will play too a large a role in determining who becomes a "have" vs a "have not"