There is very strong empirical evidence that Apple sells their stuff for prices lots of people are willing to buy. Moreover, iPhones are reasonably priced for top-end smartphones, which they are. Apple isn't interested in competing for the low end of the market.
I'm nowhere near convinced that the new MacBook Pros are a good idea, but then I never have owned an Apple laptop.
All of the new technologies you mention are useful, some very useful. None are panaceas.
Also, I've seen what happens when physicists write FORTRAN IV. It isn't pretty. Or robust or maintainable. It tended to be scalable in that the physicists could ask for more computrons.
Waterfall can work on projects with clear and unchanging specifications. I've seen a few such come out of accounting departments. (My wife liked working on accounting applications at one time, as they told her what they wanted and were happy when she delivered that.)
About all I can say is that when I've been in Scrum projects it's generally worked well, and I can see how it wouldn't work in other situations. If we were to follow one of my less serious suggestions and rewrite our code base in Common Lisp, I would not want to use Scrum as an overall methodology, although it would be possible to design the project so that Scrum could be used on many sections.
You don't have to use your imagination, and what you appear to think fairly outlandish scenarios have happened. I don't expect C# to go the way of VB (not VB.NET) or Silverlight any time soon, but despite cross-platform efforts it's still pretty well connected to Microsoft. C++ and Java, to name two, have strong communities not tied to their originating companies.
At one point, we had someone in to demonstrate TDD. At the end of an hour, he'd showed us how to build a class that exposed far too much of its internals but satisfied all the tests. I could have written it in ten minutes, it would have been at least as correct, and it would have been better code. I know that lots of people advocate TDD, but I'd like to have some experience with someone who can do better than write a crappy solution for a toy problem at snail speed.
There's also a whole lot of the code I work on that can't be unit-tested by any system I know of. A lot of what it does draws complicated things on the screen or writes long and complicated gcode that can't really be tested except by running it through a CNC mill. A lot of the code was written before anyone decided it would be a good idea to get a unit test framework.
I find it a lot cheaper to buy homeopathic remedies at the grocery store. Look for those gallon jugs of "distilled water", which are generic versions of all homeopathic remedies simultaneously.
Also, I take issue with your statement that homeopathic remedies are as good as spiritual energy. I don't absolutely know that there is no such thing as spiritual energy, or that, if it existed, it would have no medical effects.
You know, one theoretical solution to all problems of greed and corruption is to take hypothetical competent humans of known utter honesty and put them in charge. The trick is (a) ensuring that there are such people, and (b) figuring out who they are. Election through the Electoral College seems to not quite work.
While you're figuring out those things, the rest of us will try to improve the real world.
Still waiting for those releases of data/processes/methods & tools...you know, like *real* scientists do, as opposed to climate-alarmist propaganda shills posing as scientists and their political hangers-on.
When do you think the practice of real science started? I've read innumerable papers in which there was no obvious way to get the raw data, and no guarantees that it still existed.
Peer review is not to validate every aspect of a paper. The goal is to see if the methodology is reasonable, and to bring up other things in the scientific literature. For a long time, nobody really expected a raw data dump for a peer-reviewed paper. The paper would describe the methodology of data collection and the principles behind the processing, preferably in enough detail to replicate all stages of the experiment or observation.
The problem with demanding data and source code is that replication with those tells you nothing. For a result to be considered valid, it's necessary to find out if it holds with independent data collection and independent software models based on the assumptions the paper makes.
The chance of such a hit is extremely low over the next thousand years. The amount of damage it could do is very high. If the chance of an event is one in fifty million per year, and the estimated damage is five trillion dollars, the expected damage per year is a hundred thousand dollars, and it would be reasonable to assign much greater harm to such an event for cost-benefit calculations. Think of it as catastrophic health insurance for the planet.
The President generally proposes the budget, although Congress has the final say.
And, no matter if the budget was controlled by Congress or trained pigeons (and I'm not saying which would be better), the deficit has gone up with Republican Presidents (except maybe Nixon) and down with Democratic.
Responsible and law-abiding gun owners do not in general cause problems. That's what I'm sure of. It is possible to legally get a gun and be irresponsible with it. It's possible to legally get a gun and have it stolen, and by definition it's not in the hands of a law-abiding individual. Criminals owning guns are definitely a problem.
Also, there's something to be said for a ban on large magazines (I'm not saying it'd be a good thing, just that there's arguments for it). The Giffords shooter was rushed when he was reloading.
The restroom issue is a sideshow. There is no blanket permission for men to go into the ladies' room. What I'm looking at is a situation where someone who looks, acts, and dresses like a man/woman is legally forced to go into the ladies'/men's room. How would you feel if you were at a urinal, and someone who appeared female walked in and entered a stall? If a female friend of yours was coming out of a stall in the ladies' room and saw what looked to be a man coming in? I'm against laws that require that. If everybody just does the natural thing, it will work out just fine.
I'm not sure what age-inappropriate concepts you're talking about that affect life choices. Non-standard genders are not normally a choice. If a boy (biological, body) fells like he's really a girl (possibly biological, mind), then knowing that some people are transexual can help. If a boy feels like he's really a boy, how is knowing that going to cause him to make a bad life choice? I've never been tempted to go into hormone therapy and learning how to be a woman.
The odds of an asteroid being 5 years from impact is exactly the same as one being 500000 years from impact - so on what basis can you possibly say we shouldn't consider 5 years possible ?
If we're talking about a single year, then, yes, unless there's something I don't know about the odds are the same.
I never said we shouldn't consider 5 years possible. I said that there is a very low probability of such a hit in the next thousand years, which is correct.
I typed "espionage act of war" into Google, and got one source that said espionage is not an act of war, and some that either were inconclusive or didn't address the topic. I went to Cornell University Law School, and read that an act of war is armed conflict. I did further searches and found nothing that said espionage is an act of war. It would appear to be that an act of war has to actively harm a country.
Weather is a chaotic system, right? We can't predict what the actual weather will be in two weeks. That's what chaotic means in this context. We can't predict the next asteroid impact. We can make intelligent statements about how likely it is in a given period.
What we can do is find out probabilities. We can make useful statements about what the temperature probably will be on January 1, 2017, although that's much too far out in a chaotic system to figure where in that range it will be. For example, it's highly unlikely to be 80F, and the high probably will be not too far from 20F.
Statistics is what we use when we don't know or can't calculate what the real result will be. If we could calculate all the orbital mechanics for every sizable rock in the system, then we could predict the next big impact. We can't. We use statistics.
Where do you get this crap? I know this stuff cold, and its mathematical context, and I'm explaining as clearly as I know how, and you are just saying I'm wrong without reasons. Are you trolling? Stupid? Incapable of learning? So fixed on something you heard and completely misunderstood to be immune to reason?
Trade increases total wealth. Unrestricted global trade increases total wealth.
One problem with unrestricted global trade is that it's slanted against the little guy. There's a long list of stuff I can't legally buy abroad for prices there (drugs and textbooks come to mind) and have shipped in, while there's no restriction on companies outsourcing abroad. Another problem is that wealth increases have been shared very unequally, with average family income not tracking US overall productivity, so free trade tends to hurt more Americans than it helps.
These are problems created by US law and culture and practice, and need to be changed on that basis. It doesn't mean that globalization is bad for people, only that unfair globalization is bad for people.
Sometimes efficiency matters. I work on proprietary CAD software that does other things in addition, and that can get REAL slow if we're not careful. I've worked on code that takes human inputs and puts out human-readable outputs and doesn't do much heavy processing or I/O, and efficiency just doesn't matter there. If you can take those agonizingly slow human inputs and respond to them within a tenth of a second for desktop software, you're golden, and any time you spend making it more efficient than that is wasted.
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Yup. I've got a small amount of a transuranic element in my house. I consider that really cool.
Could well be. I'd like to see a competently run demo sometime.
If you don't care about future language development, you're probably OK.
I'm not inclined to get another random Windows laptop in the hope that it won't be a problem to put a Linux partition on.
Do you have malware from the App Store? There's always going to be things in stores that you think are crap.
There is very strong empirical evidence that Apple sells their stuff for prices lots of people are willing to buy. Moreover, iPhones are reasonably priced for top-end smartphones, which they are. Apple isn't interested in competing for the low end of the market.
I'm nowhere near convinced that the new MacBook Pros are a good idea, but then I never have owned an Apple laptop.
On the other hand, it's better to have ten product lines, of which none spontaneously explode, than twenty, one of which does.
All of the new technologies you mention are useful, some very useful. None are panaceas.
Also, I've seen what happens when physicists write FORTRAN IV. It isn't pretty. Or robust or maintainable. It tended to be scalable in that the physicists could ask for more computrons.
Waterfall can work on projects with clear and unchanging specifications. I've seen a few such come out of accounting departments. (My wife liked working on accounting applications at one time, as they told her what they wanted and were happy when she delivered that.)
About all I can say is that when I've been in Scrum projects it's generally worked well, and I can see how it wouldn't work in other situations. If we were to follow one of my less serious suggestions and rewrite our code base in Common Lisp, I would not want to use Scrum as an overall methodology, although it would be possible to design the project so that Scrum could be used on many sections.
You don't have to use your imagination, and what you appear to think fairly outlandish scenarios have happened. I don't expect C# to go the way of VB (not VB.NET) or Silverlight any time soon, but despite cross-platform efforts it's still pretty well connected to Microsoft. C++ and Java, to name two, have strong communities not tied to their originating companies.
At one point, we had someone in to demonstrate TDD. At the end of an hour, he'd showed us how to build a class that exposed far too much of its internals but satisfied all the tests. I could have written it in ten minutes, it would have been at least as correct, and it would have been better code. I know that lots of people advocate TDD, but I'd like to have some experience with someone who can do better than write a crappy solution for a toy problem at snail speed.
There's also a whole lot of the code I work on that can't be unit-tested by any system I know of. A lot of what it does draws complicated things on the screen or writes long and complicated gcode that can't really be tested except by running it through a CNC mill. A lot of the code was written before anyone decided it would be a good idea to get a unit test framework.
I find it a lot cheaper to buy homeopathic remedies at the grocery store. Look for those gallon jugs of "distilled water", which are generic versions of all homeopathic remedies simultaneously.
Also, I take issue with your statement that homeopathic remedies are as good as spiritual energy. I don't absolutely know that there is no such thing as spiritual energy, or that, if it existed, it would have no medical effects.
You know, one theoretical solution to all problems of greed and corruption is to take hypothetical competent humans of known utter honesty and put them in charge. The trick is (a) ensuring that there are such people, and (b) figuring out who they are. Election through the Electoral College seems to not quite work.
While you're figuring out those things, the rest of us will try to improve the real world.
When do you think the practice of real science started? I've read innumerable papers in which there was no obvious way to get the raw data, and no guarantees that it still existed.
Peer review is not to validate every aspect of a paper. The goal is to see if the methodology is reasonable, and to bring up other things in the scientific literature. For a long time, nobody really expected a raw data dump for a peer-reviewed paper. The paper would describe the methodology of data collection and the principles behind the processing, preferably in enough detail to replicate all stages of the experiment or observation.
The problem with demanding data and source code is that replication with those tells you nothing. For a result to be considered valid, it's necessary to find out if it holds with independent data collection and independent software models based on the assumptions the paper makes.
The chance of such a hit is extremely low over the next thousand years. The amount of damage it could do is very high. If the chance of an event is one in fifty million per year, and the estimated damage is five trillion dollars, the expected damage per year is a hundred thousand dollars, and it would be reasonable to assign much greater harm to such an event for cost-benefit calculations. Think of it as catastrophic health insurance for the planet.
The President generally proposes the budget, although Congress has the final say.
And, no matter if the budget was controlled by Congress or trained pigeons (and I'm not saying which would be better), the deficit has gone up with Republican Presidents (except maybe Nixon) and down with Democratic.
Responsible and law-abiding gun owners do not in general cause problems. That's what I'm sure of. It is possible to legally get a gun and be irresponsible with it. It's possible to legally get a gun and have it stolen, and by definition it's not in the hands of a law-abiding individual. Criminals owning guns are definitely a problem.
Also, there's something to be said for a ban on large magazines (I'm not saying it'd be a good thing, just that there's arguments for it). The Giffords shooter was rushed when he was reloading.
The restroom issue is a sideshow. There is no blanket permission for men to go into the ladies' room. What I'm looking at is a situation where someone who looks, acts, and dresses like a man/woman is legally forced to go into the ladies'/men's room. How would you feel if you were at a urinal, and someone who appeared female walked in and entered a stall? If a female friend of yours was coming out of a stall in the ladies' room and saw what looked to be a man coming in? I'm against laws that require that. If everybody just does the natural thing, it will work out just fine.
I'm not sure what age-inappropriate concepts you're talking about that affect life choices. Non-standard genders are not normally a choice. If a boy (biological, body) fells like he's really a girl (possibly biological, mind), then knowing that some people are transexual can help. If a boy feels like he's really a boy, how is knowing that going to cause him to make a bad life choice? I've never been tempted to go into hormone therapy and learning how to be a woman.
If we're talking about a single year, then, yes, unless there's something I don't know about the odds are the same.
I never said we shouldn't consider 5 years possible. I said that there is a very low probability of such a hit in the next thousand years, which is correct.
I typed "espionage act of war" into Google, and got one source that said espionage is not an act of war, and some that either were inconclusive or didn't address the topic. I went to Cornell University Law School, and read that an act of war is armed conflict. I did further searches and found nothing that said espionage is an act of war. It would appear to be that an act of war has to actively harm a country.
Weather is a chaotic system, right? We can't predict what the actual weather will be in two weeks. That's what chaotic means in this context. We can't predict the next asteroid impact. We can make intelligent statements about how likely it is in a given period.
What we can do is find out probabilities. We can make useful statements about what the temperature probably will be on January 1, 2017, although that's much too far out in a chaotic system to figure where in that range it will be. For example, it's highly unlikely to be 80F, and the high probably will be not too far from 20F.
Statistics is what we use when we don't know or can't calculate what the real result will be. If we could calculate all the orbital mechanics for every sizable rock in the system, then we could predict the next big impact. We can't. We use statistics.
Where do you get this crap? I know this stuff cold, and its mathematical context, and I'm explaining as clearly as I know how, and you are just saying I'm wrong without reasons. Are you trolling? Stupid? Incapable of learning? So fixed on something you heard and completely misunderstood to be immune to reason?
Trade increases total wealth. Unrestricted global trade increases total wealth.
One problem with unrestricted global trade is that it's slanted against the little guy. There's a long list of stuff I can't legally buy abroad for prices there (drugs and textbooks come to mind) and have shipped in, while there's no restriction on companies outsourcing abroad. Another problem is that wealth increases have been shared very unequally, with average family income not tracking US overall productivity, so free trade tends to hurt more Americans than it helps.
These are problems created by US law and culture and practice, and need to be changed on that basis. It doesn't mean that globalization is bad for people, only that unfair globalization is bad for people.
Sometimes efficiency matters. I work on proprietary CAD software that does other things in addition, and that can get REAL slow if we're not careful. I've worked on code that takes human inputs and puts out human-readable outputs and doesn't do much heavy processing or I/O, and efficiency just doesn't matter there. If you can take those agonizingly slow human inputs and respond to them within a tenth of a second for desktop software, you're golden, and any time you spend making it more efficient than that is wasted.