If talking about programming isn't cool, and programming is what you do (i.e. not something your daddy sent you to school for to cash in on) then you're simply talking to the wrong people. I don't care if programming is 'cool.' I understand that a lot of people aren't interested in software development, or algorithms, or computer science proper. Those people are uninteresting to me, just as I am uninteresting to them. I've got better things to do than make small talk.
Note that 'programming' is kind of like 'engineering' in that it covers a lot of smaller specific interests; my fiance knows little of code, but my keen interest in efficient model design and algorithmic data encapsulation fits firmly parallel her own interests (pursuing a PhD in economics). The opinions of the MBAs or the geologists or the lit crits are of relatively little importance to me.
I guess in a way it's a lot like GNU/Linux. The year of Linux on the desktop isn't here, and may never be here, and it doesn't matter, because I can still use it just fine. Hell, it's better than that because being open source it cannot disappear, and so long as there is a single person who knows a bit of code who likes it, it will see continued development. Do you see the parallel? I may never be a hit at parties given by people that are uninteresting to me, but it doesn't matter, because I love what I do, I do it well, and it's important to society at large, so I'll always be able to do it. I don't feel the need to be 'cool' and accrue superficial connections with people that I won't learn anything from and whom won't learn anything from me, simply because we're headed in different directions.
What I'm saying is 'cool' means 'form instead of function', and I suppose in that sense, yes, Apple has made programmers 'cool.'
You know, that's a very reasonable and informative reply -- more than my too-snarky quip deserved. Thank you for that:) I got up a bit too early, methinks. Sorry if I sounded sharp.
On topic, I'm thinking about your points regarding the article and seeing some merit there -- I don't know if I am ready to completely discard it, but certainly can see a serious slant going on, there. The issues you point out would at the very least deserve mention if they weren't malicious. You're certainly correct that it is not above-board. Hmmmmm.
Regarding local income disparity -- how does that change the distribution of wealth graph? Or, in other words, what does it look like in terms of multiples of local median income per person? Well, no, now that I think about it, that would be a huge job to try to control (ultrarich neighborhoods, multiple residences, etc.) and my intuition tells me that as absolute income rises you become more insulated to differences like that by sheer virtue of ability to relocate. Gotta be a paper in there somewhere, but my original point isn't holding much water so I won't belabor it.
Large, well known university -- in state tuition is less than 6k a year. Minimum wage full time is 16k/yr; so you could easily pay it off entirely. Even if you chose not to, you could pay a lot of it before graduating (and interest accrual). Even failing that, your maximum loan amount would be less than twenty-four thousand dollars.
Oh, what? In-state tuition isn't fair? Now we get to the crux of the issue. No one seems to take cost of university into account when planning attendance -- they go to an out-of-state party school or overpriced private institution, live beyond their means by taking out huge amounts of loans, and then expect everyone else to foot the bill. They have no one to blame but themselves.
The memos you are referencing (concerning a discussion of whether a Java license would be necessary for Dalvik) had nothing to do with patents -- Java licensing is a copyright matter, and it is Google's legal opinion that their cleanroom implementation releases them from the necessity of licensing. Until the case is concluded a definitive statement cannot be made on this.
Oh, and re: your sig: "the proof that Samsung is copying Apple is that they both come in a box that's not bigger than necessary, and both have apps that show a picture of a microphone when you speak into your phone like a microphone." Truly damning evidence, that. The plug is interesting, but then Samsung has to make Apple's hardware for them, so it's not surprising. God forbid a plug be as small as possible.
Ah, yes, the surely-objective opinions of "WinSuperSite"...which find that Google is stifling competition by providing an open-sourced smartphone kernel to anyone who asks, and is oppressing the poor, abused coalition of every other smartphone vendor who banded together specifically to pay an exorbitant price for smartphone-related patents and immediately as a group set about suing over Android devices (exclusively). Curiously, they did this when Android's marketshare started to make theirs look rather foolish. Yes, they just want to protect their intellectual property, such as the milestone achievement "No. 6,339,780 placing a loading status icon in the content area of a browser." By precisely duplicating the functionality of "placing a loading status icon in the content area of a browser", Google is oppressing competition, necessitating the actions of Microsoft in demanding license fees in excess of their own product's cost for infringements that they refuse to disclose before being paid.
Look, you seem like a nice guy. But what you're doing here is misrepresentation. When you use dishonesty to support a group, it makes the whole group look bad. Think about it.
The whole story is partisan trash; I invite anyone to go to the articles source and browse the archives. They literally have a "why this is going to fail" article for every major Android product release, obscure "experts" decrying the benefit of any tech not found in iPhones (quad-core processors, newer nVidia chips, etc.), talk about how new Android versions "won't save them"; they do have a (very few) positive articles about Android features, but the overwhelming majority of content on their site is anti-Android and pro-Apple. There are valid complaints to have with Android, but it's top in marketshare, and it looks just a little fishy when 90% of stories are so heavily critical of Android.
That's without getting to the meat of the matter, though. They make a lot of talk in the article about the poor reviews, about problems rearing their "ugly heads" throughout "almost every review," and then at the end they link two -- one of which calls the Kindle Fire "revolutionary" and gives it their first Editor's Choice for small tablets, and the other stating it's unquestionably a terrific value. Neither is anything but enthusiastic. So one has to wonder where, exactly, the conclusion in TFA comes from?
This is just more Apple dittohead speak. Apple makes quality products. I wish they made quality users.
OT, but I owe almost my entire programming career to Gorillas; it was just complex enough for an 8-year-old to make 'cool' modifications to.
The first 'development cycle' of my life was changing the explosion radius of the bananas (nuclear bananas, yeah!) and encountering dissatisfaction with the result -- the game drew a series of concentric, colored ellipses to represent the explosion, and then the same series with background color to erase them (and the damaged terrain). The ellipse-drawing library function in QBasic (understandably) has aliasing problems such that drawing radius 1, then 2, then 3, and so forth would miss some pixels which fell between the lines of the ellipses, leaving unsightly floating particles. I can't remember how I fixed it, but I think it was drawing horizontally-bounded background-colored lines down the vertical axis of the largest ellipse.
Anyway, that was the most fun I'd ever had, at the time. Now I think about that old, silly program and... want to go write a Gorillas clone *grin*. It wouldn't be the same with modern tools, though -- there was a lot of charm in that old, slow VESA pixel-juggling.
Maybe if we didn't spend all our money murdering foreigners in their own countries, and worked on improving ourselves instead, we wouldn't have all these problems. If you're in the military and are worried these substandard parts are endangering your life, then stop being an oppressor, stop being a parasite on the economy, and get the hell out.
You're right; everyone should leave the military, and we should stand defenseless, and of course everyone will be so amazed at our adherence to principles that they won't come in for the harvest. Perhaps our military has been too proactive of late -- but, then again, perhaps it hasn't. It's hard to say for certain, and certainly not cause for knee-jerk nonsense.
Listen. Pacifism only works when you defend it. Pacifism without defense isn't pacifism -- it's denial.
And compressing back and forth with external program all the time is just stupid.
What's an external program? What makes code in a separate binary to compress/decompress different from code baked into the filesystem to compress/decompress? If the files aren't accessed that often what's wrong with a simple compress/decompress script?
This is another case of an ignorant armchair administrator (with no real-world experience) unwilling to let go of a bad idea when presented with superior alternatives and cold, hard facts.
MBAs were fast-track tickets to jobs back when companies were doubling their management infrastructure every few years. Now that money is going to production, MBAs aren't any more useful than history majors. It has nothing to do with being "born in poverty"; I know literally hundreds of BAs and MAs in STEM fields with extremely high job marketability.
Also, money lost to rent = money lost to interest, except your house isn't appreciating in value and you're living in substandard conditions. Unless you are getting a truly bad deal or interest is very high, you lose more money by renting than you do by taking a mortgage, and lose many benefits.
I agree with this so hard it hurts. There is an absolutely perfect opportunity here for OSS to do exactly what it's good at -- being more efficient and more available than corporate spaghetti -- but we're still spinning our wheels on usability because of pride. Ubuntu is the only one really blazing a trail, here, and they're catching flak for it (among other things they might deserve flak for *grin*).
The Turing test here is simple -- can someone with median computer knowledge sit in a room by themselves without internet access and get through a normal day? How about first-time setup? If not, it's not ready and it's a powertool. If so, we can make the world a better place. That's about the size of it.
Sorry, buddy, 10-15GB per month is worth whatever the people providing it say it is. Your remark about how you can get 3mbps wired for $500 a month paired with your complaint that $150 for 10 times that out of thin air seems a little strange.
You really don't get it, do you? People like you are the reason there's a cap to begin with. What you are doing -- trying to run your business off of cellphone data links at consumer single- or family-user prices -- is exactly like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and sneaking food out to feed your friends. Yours is the very definition of unreasonable use.
If you really think your company is "going down the tubes" if you have to pay for business-class internet access (as opposed to violating the spirit of consumer low-volume carrier agreements) then that suggests to me that your business plan needs some reworking.
What movie was it you could only see in 3D, again?
After considering that -- it's trivial to take a "3D" film and show it in 2D, if that's what people really want. You don't hear about that much because people don't want that.
The numbers don't lie. 3D makes money. That means people with money want 3D. You don't appear to understand how this works.
I like that trick of having all the "pre" iPad stuff oriented one way, then having the iPad and everything following oriented another, in the hope that people don't notice that most tablets don't use the iPad aspect ratio. Any time people resort to trickery, it means they know their main point is questionable.
Also, tying into a comment I made above: what if you had all vehicles "pre" Model T and "post" Model T? How do you think that would look? Why do you think that is?
I didn't used to disdain Apple products until I started noticing that exposure to them really does seem to erode critical thinking skills.
Yeah, just like the brilliant design students who decided to make computers smaller than a battleship, right? I mean, it seems obvious now that desktop computers should be smaller, thinner, and lighter, but we never would have guessed if it weren't for the first people who happened to do it after it was technically feasible. Pardon me while I roll my eyes.
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If talking about programming isn't cool, and programming is what you do (i.e. not something your daddy sent you to school for to cash in on) then you're simply talking to the wrong people. I don't care if programming is 'cool.' I understand that a lot of people aren't interested in software development, or algorithms, or computer science proper. Those people are uninteresting to me, just as I am uninteresting to them. I've got better things to do than make small talk.
Note that 'programming' is kind of like 'engineering' in that it covers a lot of smaller specific interests; my fiance knows little of code, but my keen interest in efficient model design and algorithmic data encapsulation fits firmly parallel her own interests (pursuing a PhD in economics). The opinions of the MBAs or the geologists or the lit crits are of relatively little importance to me.
I guess in a way it's a lot like GNU/Linux. The year of Linux on the desktop isn't here, and may never be here, and it doesn't matter, because I can still use it just fine. Hell, it's better than that because being open source it cannot disappear, and so long as there is a single person who knows a bit of code who likes it, it will see continued development. Do you see the parallel? I may never be a hit at parties given by people that are uninteresting to me, but it doesn't matter, because I love what I do, I do it well, and it's important to society at large, so I'll always be able to do it. I don't feel the need to be 'cool' and accrue superficial connections with people that I won't learn anything from and whom won't learn anything from me, simply because we're headed in different directions.
What I'm saying is 'cool' means 'form instead of function', and I suppose in that sense, yes, Apple has made programmers 'cool.'
You know, that's a very reasonable and informative reply -- more than my too-snarky quip deserved. Thank you for that :) I got up a bit too early, methinks. Sorry if I sounded sharp.
On topic, I'm thinking about your points regarding the article and seeing some merit there -- I don't know if I am ready to completely discard it, but certainly can see a serious slant going on, there. The issues you point out would at the very least deserve mention if they weren't malicious. You're certainly correct that it is not above-board. Hmmmmm.
Regarding local income disparity -- how does that change the distribution of wealth graph? Or, in other words, what does it look like in terms of multiples of local median income per person? Well, no, now that I think about it, that would be a huge job to try to control (ultrarich neighborhoods, multiple residences, etc.) and my intuition tells me that as absolute income rises you become more insulated to differences like that by sheer virtue of ability to relocate. Gotta be a paper in there somewhere, but my original point isn't holding much water so I won't belabor it.
*takes a look for himself*
Large, well known university -- in state tuition is less than 6k a year. Minimum wage full time is 16k/yr; so you could easily pay it off entirely. Even if you chose not to, you could pay a lot of it before graduating (and interest accrual). Even failing that, your maximum loan amount would be less than twenty-four thousand dollars.
Oh, what? In-state tuition isn't fair? Now we get to the crux of the issue. No one seems to take cost of university into account when planning attendance -- they go to an out-of-state party school or overpriced private institution, live beyond their means by taking out huge amounts of loans, and then expect everyone else to foot the bill. They have no one to blame but themselves.
"I think your article is suspect because ... because ... well, just because. You have to find another one." Moving the goalpost, no true scotsman, etc.
Re: "oh, wages are higher in NYC" -- funny, I don't see any of those evil 1% income disparity graphs correcting for location.
Links curiously absent, I see.
Uh, Microsoft is the blue line there, boss. They're underperforming.
The memos you are referencing (concerning a discussion of whether a Java license would be necessary for Dalvik) had nothing to do with patents -- Java licensing is a copyright matter, and it is Google's legal opinion that their cleanroom implementation releases them from the necessity of licensing. Until the case is concluded a definitive statement cannot be made on this.
Oh, and re: your sig: "the proof that Samsung is copying Apple is that they both come in a box that's not bigger than necessary, and both have apps that show a picture of a microphone when you speak into your phone like a microphone." Truly damning evidence, that. The plug is interesting, but then Samsung has to make Apple's hardware for them, so it's not surprising. God forbid a plug be as small as possible.
Ah, yes, the surely-objective opinions of "WinSuperSite"...which find that Google is stifling competition by providing an open-sourced smartphone kernel to anyone who asks, and is oppressing the poor, abused coalition of every other smartphone vendor who banded together specifically to pay an exorbitant price for smartphone-related patents and immediately as a group set about suing over Android devices (exclusively). Curiously, they did this when Android's marketshare started to make theirs look rather foolish. Yes, they just want to protect their intellectual property, such as the milestone achievement "No. 6,339,780 placing a loading status icon in the content area of a browser." By precisely duplicating the functionality of "placing a loading status icon in the content area of a browser", Google is oppressing competition, necessitating the actions of Microsoft in demanding license fees in excess of their own product's cost for infringements that they refuse to disclose before being paid.
TL;DR: give me a break.
Yeah, I can tell you're doing pretty bad; in your posting history you discuss your thousands of dollars worth of lenses and thousands of dollars worth of cameras, your $600 superphone, your recent relocation to Orange County, and conveniently failed to mention that your "BS and MS science degrees" are in geology, which was never a job field with any demand and therefore is irrelevant to the discussion of job availability.
Look, you seem like a nice guy. But what you're doing here is misrepresentation. When you use dishonesty to support a group, it makes the whole group look bad. Think about it.
This.
The whole story is partisan trash; I invite anyone to go to the articles source and browse the archives. They literally have a "why this is going to fail" article for every major Android product release, obscure "experts" decrying the benefit of any tech not found in iPhones (quad-core processors, newer nVidia chips, etc.), talk about how new Android versions "won't save them"; they do have a (very few) positive articles about Android features, but the overwhelming majority of content on their site is anti-Android and pro-Apple. There are valid complaints to have with Android, but it's top in marketshare, and it looks just a little fishy when 90% of stories are so heavily critical of Android.
That's without getting to the meat of the matter, though. They make a lot of talk in the article about the poor reviews, about problems rearing their "ugly heads" throughout "almost every review," and then at the end they link two -- one of which calls the Kindle Fire "revolutionary" and gives it their first Editor's Choice for small tablets, and the other stating it's unquestionably a terrific value. Neither is anything but enthusiastic. So one has to wonder where, exactly, the conclusion in TFA comes from?
This is just more Apple dittohead speak. Apple makes quality products. I wish they made quality users.
OT, but I owe almost my entire programming career to Gorillas; it was just complex enough for an 8-year-old to make 'cool' modifications to.
The first 'development cycle' of my life was changing the explosion radius of the bananas (nuclear bananas, yeah!) and encountering dissatisfaction with the result -- the game drew a series of concentric, colored ellipses to represent the explosion, and then the same series with background color to erase them (and the damaged terrain). The ellipse-drawing library function in QBasic (understandably) has aliasing problems such that drawing radius 1, then 2, then 3, and so forth would miss some pixels which fell between the lines of the ellipses, leaving unsightly floating particles. I can't remember how I fixed it, but I think it was drawing horizontally-bounded background-colored lines down the vertical axis of the largest ellipse.
Anyway, that was the most fun I'd ever had, at the time. Now I think about that old, silly program and... want to go write a Gorillas clone *grin*. It wouldn't be the same with modern tools, though -- there was a lot of charm in that old, slow VESA pixel-juggling.
After some of the stuff I've been reading here, this cheered me up immensely. Thanks for that, and for making the world a better place.
Maybe if we didn't spend all our money murdering foreigners in their own countries, and worked on improving ourselves instead, we wouldn't have all these problems. If you're in the military and are worried these substandard parts are endangering your life, then stop being an oppressor, stop being a parasite on the economy, and get the hell out.
You're right; everyone should leave the military, and we should stand defenseless, and of course everyone will be so amazed at our adherence to principles that they won't come in for the harvest. Perhaps our military has been too proactive of late -- but, then again, perhaps it hasn't. It's hard to say for certain, and certainly not cause for knee-jerk nonsense.
Listen. Pacifism only works when you defend it. Pacifism without defense isn't pacifism -- it's denial.
Examples?
And compressing back and forth with external program all the time is just stupid.
What's an external program? What makes code in a separate binary to compress/decompress different from code baked into the filesystem to compress/decompress? If the files aren't accessed that often what's wrong with a simple compress/decompress script?
This is another case of an ignorant armchair administrator (with no real-world experience) unwilling to let go of a bad idea when presented with superior alternatives and cold, hard facts.
MBAs were fast-track tickets to jobs back when companies were doubling their management infrastructure every few years. Now that money is going to production, MBAs aren't any more useful than history majors. It has nothing to do with being "born in poverty"; I know literally hundreds of BAs and MAs in STEM fields with extremely high job marketability.
This is what you did, I suppose? Oh, no? I see.
Also, money lost to rent = money lost to interest, except your house isn't appreciating in value and you're living in substandard conditions. Unless you are getting a truly bad deal or interest is very high, you lose more money by renting than you do by taking a mortgage, and lose many benefits.
Good luck driving your kids to suicide, though.
Where do you live while you are saving money? What equity do you get for living there?
I agree with this so hard it hurts. There is an absolutely perfect opportunity here for OSS to do exactly what it's good at -- being more efficient and more available than corporate spaghetti -- but we're still spinning our wheels on usability because of pride. Ubuntu is the only one really blazing a trail, here, and they're catching flak for it (among other things they might deserve flak for *grin*).
The Turing test here is simple -- can someone with median computer knowledge sit in a room by themselves without internet access and get through a normal day? How about first-time setup? If not, it's not ready and it's a powertool. If so, we can make the world a better place. That's about the size of it.
Sorry, buddy, 10-15GB per month is worth whatever the people providing it say it is. Your remark about how you can get 3mbps wired for $500 a month paired with your complaint that $150 for 10 times that out of thin air seems a little strange.
You really don't get it, do you? People like you are the reason there's a cap to begin with. What you are doing -- trying to run your business off of cellphone data links at consumer single- or family-user prices -- is exactly like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and sneaking food out to feed your friends. Yours is the very definition of unreasonable use.
If you really think your company is "going down the tubes" if you have to pay for business-class internet access (as opposed to violating the spirit of consumer low-volume carrier agreements) then that suggests to me that your business plan needs some reworking.
What movie was it you could only see in 3D, again?
After considering that -- it's trivial to take a "3D" film and show it in 2D, if that's what people really want. You don't hear about that much because people don't want that.
The numbers don't lie. 3D makes money. That means people with money want 3D. You don't appear to understand how this works.
Missed the shining silver "SAMSUNG" on it, did you?
It says "Samsung" on the front of it. Your turn.
I like that trick of having all the "pre" iPad stuff oriented one way, then having the iPad and everything following oriented another, in the hope that people don't notice that most tablets don't use the iPad aspect ratio. Any time people resort to trickery, it means they know their main point is questionable.
Also, tying into a comment I made above: what if you had all vehicles "pre" Model T and "post" Model T? How do you think that would look? Why do you think that is?
I didn't used to disdain Apple products until I started noticing that exposure to them really does seem to erode critical thinking skills.
Yeah, just like the brilliant design students who decided to make computers smaller than a battleship, right? I mean, it seems obvious now that desktop computers should be smaller, thinner, and lighter, but we never would have guessed if it weren't for the first people who happened to do it after it was technically feasible. Pardon me while I roll my eyes.