Not meaning any disrespect to the creators/language, but Objective-C is grown because it's what iOS devices use for programming with. If Apple had used Python or C++ we'd be using that instead. The rise/fall of languages now has just as much (if not more) to do with what devices they're put in as much as any construct of the language.
I swear that at times Slashdot feels like a bunch of stuffy comp-sci folks stuck in the 80's. You'll argue day and night about minor technical details, but it's none of those details/minutia that really make a product take off. Sure, flaws will kill a product, but beyond a very simple point, they are just a tool to get a job done. Steve Jobs understood that, maybe we should too and stop the language circle-jerks.
I think you made a fair assessment from my experience. One addition/correction I would add - and it's a big one.
Finding *qualified* candidates is the key phrase. We get lots of interviews from recent graduates, but many of us lament at how bad a great number of them are. The ones that went to U of Pheonix or other trade schools are just not suitable as systems coders (jobs we pay very well for). I don't know if it's universities failing to educate, or standards going up. I would guess a little of both. We need device driver writers, multithreaded system programers, graphics, etc, and it's very hard to find event experienced coders that are good at that. Most fail our screenings. It's not good enough anymore just to show up with a sheepskin in CS. You need to demonstrate you can actually build and debug something. For candidates that show initiative with personal projects and can demonstrate solid coding/debugging and can talk intelligently about architecture - we'll hire you in a MINUTE with some of the highest salaries in the industry. If you can't, then you're one of the 10,000 other global coders anyone can get. We do hiring lots of promising newbies all the time - but they have to show that initial spark and understanding at least. You can't just show up and be gimme a job cause I got a diploma.
I think this brings us to a great career point. You don't want to be floating in the middle as one of the masses in engineering - following just the trend lines. Sure, you need relevant skills so don't run out and become the ADA expert; but perhaps an example. If you were a Java/web coder in the very early 2000's when the bubble popped - a great number of those people never found work again and left the field. I felt bad for all the CS grads from my school that had just taught them Java (they don't know, they primarily teach C/C++ again and now we hire them). Unfortunately, when you're part of the big crowd, you're career and pay is driven much by the crowd and you must be really, really exceptional to stand out.
What will make you OODLES of money in engineering is being a master of certain much needed, but not well peopled, technique. I knew several guys that were above average coders but commanded insane amounts of money to come in and deliver a certain kind of feature. They went the contracting themselves out route and simply re-regurgitated the 1 of the 5 or so techniques they had implemented for this task really well, picked up a fat check, wash, rinse and repeat. I know personally of at least 2 different sets of people doing this with 2 completely different technologies. Sure, every year or two needed to spend some time updating and revamping the codebase, but they worked about 2-3 jobs a year and then took 3-6 mo off - and made large 6-figure salaries. Those are the people that get rich in engineering. You simply won't get rich working for a company unless you've got some kind of share of the sales.
So it is possible to get a job even as a new grad, but you need to stand out more now than before.
Amen sitkill - this has been my experience too.
I'm absolutely no Apple fan - but the amount of anti-iPhone FUD on this thread is pretty terrible and continues a line of denial I've seen again and again. I've developed commercially for Android, Win7Phone, and yes, iPhone. When I test an app for Apple, I need *at most* 2 iPad's and 2-3 different iPhones.
When I test for Android or Win7Phone, I need a box full of phones. Each one has a slightly different conrtrol layout, slightly different sensitivities, driver and version bugs, power-sucking hot paths, etc. How anyone can say it's as easy to validate for a Google phone market as it is for iPhone has no idea what they are talking about. Sure anybody can *develop* an app that should work just fine on any of those devices, but the reality is when you have a revenue stream on the line, you absolutely must validate it. In a marketplace where people will delete and badmouth your app if you so much as simply use their battery badly (let alone bugs or usability issues), you can't afford to live in an ivory palace.
This is a huge problem for both Google and Win7/8 phones. It's certainly an additional cost to developers and I can only see a few solutions:
1. Common platform - require the use of one or only a few chip vendors and hardware mfcts with validated hardware/driver stacks
2. Simulators that can mimic all the hardware out there and all the driver stacks/OS versions and tell you of upcoming problems with power issues, rendering bugs, etc.
3. A defined set of control layouts garanteed to give good perf/responses and a means of changing control schemes in your game to whatever the user wants.
This should help, but it sure seems like a very tall order to me since Google already has a slew of OS drops out there and some pretty badly behaving phone vendors racing to the bottom on some of their models.
It helps if you have 3 months salary in reserve for emergencies like you should so you don't end up entering a bad situation out of desperation.
Currently, I would recommend people have 6-12 months saved up. Jobs report in August said the AVERAGE length of unemployment is 40.4 weeks. Granted, that's including all industries; but the reality is that it's worse out there than people think.
What about this: Since they're taking photos from multiple 'flashes' of the illuminating laser over time - conceptually - shouldn't the quantum properties of light bending/scattering be visible?
What if we used this to shoot the standard diffraction grating quantum experiment or other examples of strange quantum properties. Would we see frame-to-frame quantum discontinuities based on when the sampling occurred?
Remember how EVERYTHING was going to be free? Free information, free software, free everything. Didn't quite work out for good reasons, and now we've moved on. He clearly hasn't. While I agree with him that cel phones are a good way to be tracked, I also know that if I ever *need* to hide from the government, I can put that fully charged cel phone on the back of a UPS semi and get a pay-as-you go.
As others have said, his brand of 'freedom' sounds more like a blend of wishful thinking and paranoia.
I have a 3GS, and with the last 4 or so updates from Apple, it's been consistently getting slower and slower across the board. Slower response times when starting/closing apps/keyboard trays, slower browsing, and most notably - slower than HECK at starting the camera app. Anyone else notice how horribly long it takes to start the app and take the first photo sometimes? That never happened before.
I'm almost certain at this point that they're trying to 'force' upgrades to the new iPhone 4 by making their old devices slower. Sure it sounds conspiracy theory; but I've already seen a lot of it happening. It's already been proven by the jail-braker guys that the 3GS can do HDR photography just like the 4G with just the flip of a single registry bit. The iOS SDK also supposedly required the new version of Snow Leopard OS, unless you also flipped a hidden registry bit and it worked fine on the old OS.
And with my tinfoil hat on, I also notice there is no way to roll back your iPhone to an earlier version of iOS so I could do some timed comparisons. In fact, given my choice, I'd roll back to right before they introduced multithreading - which really seemed to do nothing other than slow my phone down and show that I'm only getting half the bars I used too (if you remember that fiasco).
I'm using UEFI on my new Sandybridge system right now - and MAN is it nicer. Booting on partitions larger than 2TB is probably one of the biggest wins now that 3TB drives are shipping (CMOS is limited to 2TB boot partitions). The GUI display with ability to use keyboard+mouse right away is very nice. It's also SO overdue that looking at older bios' makes me cringe. Really? Text setup with what looks like old BBS color schemes? Am I setting up by modem still?
Sure they had the degrading SATA controller bug, but it's fixed and now and my board hasn't shown any signs of the problem anyway since I'm using the 6gb/s ports (my free cross-shipped replacement board is due any day now anyway).
DRM will always be cracked. You are not stopping pirates.
I agree, but it's getting MUCH more difficult to crack things. The days of some skript kiddie with SoftICE or the like reverse-engineering something are almost, if not already, gone. The latest consoles were hacked by teams of security experts over the courses of months and that time-frame isn't getting much shorter. Some security like Microsoft's elliptical encryption on their media files has never been cracked - only circumvented when you already have the key.
I fear that soon there will only be MS/PhD level folks able to break these schemes, and with such a small pool of that kind of talent, they could quickly shut down or make such activities so painful legally they stop. Then things WON'T be cracked anymore. After all, if you're a genius-level computer scientists, do you really want to risk it all to get free movies?
There will always be ideological folks, but that' usually not the majority who have mortgages, wives, and kids.
And here is the big one. Device drivers! Linux's hardware support is actually very good but it needs a stable binary device driver interface! Oh and "checking before you buy" is not so easy.
Good observation - but I'd argue that if your customer/user even NEEDS to know to check about a 'device driver' then you've completely failed to grasp why Apple wins the customer again and again.
People want/need/deserve computers and operating systems that work FOR them - not the other way around. There's a real, and big shift going on that I hope we as developers are realizing.
We're moving to mobile devices increasingly - the desktop is dying in every metric of sales. Heck, even laptops are beginning to be affected by smart phones, ipads, and netbooks. Desktops will always be needed for content creation, laptops also - but the shares of sales are radically changing. In those new mobile environments, the ones that are really winning are the ones that are providing very simple black boxes that get me on the web, email, and watching videos. The user is even willing to pay *more* for crummy DRM'ed content provided that they get Lady Gaga in a really simple interface and can easily play it. To make these things easier in general for the first-time device user, this means you *constrain* the path of purchase/use so that it is easy to work out. Sure it's not configurable and you're locked into one platform - but nobody cares so long as it looks cool, can easily be done, and works on other things in that line. The fact it won't work on another users platform doesn't become a factor until well AFTER the person has plunked down all the money. Yes, this is crummy - but it's the truth.
Internally, this means we're starting to move back to vertical stacks a la the old 70's Sun/IBM/DEC days. The users of small/mobile devices increasingly want SOLUTIONS not tons of confusing CHOICES that they need to read about/learn about. While choices and options are empirically better - the hidden quality is that people actually value their time/image and the desire NOT to have to learn all kinds of technical details or walk around with stupid looking devices that look like a teenagers tricked out rice rocket. They're willing to pay more NOT to have to know about any of the details.
What we as nerds forget is there is other currency besides features and ideology. There is time and social stigma - and these are much more important to the end user. If you're in a social situation and you want to buy/play a song or show someone a video; if you have to go "here we go! Oh, wait a second. Ummm, lemmie configure this codec, etc..." vs. "Here's this youtube video....lol" What a difference! That second example shows how you just built social currency and valued the users TIME - the first shot down the whole moment, wasted their time, added frustration, and made the person appear foolish to their friends/business associates. I think we often forget this 'soft' factor is FAR more important to the user than most other factors.
And after all - we invented computers to do work FOR us, not that we bend ourselves to their needs. That might have been true back in the day, but there's no excuse for having to think the way the computer wants things anymore. It's a big mental shift - but one we as developers better get used too.
So, when we're done with the high-school pope/Catholic Church/religion bashing that isn't changing either side's opinions - maybe we can get down to some interesting and intelligent discussion.
I find this topic fascinating - and with a modicum of truth behind it. I was listening to 2 different discussions by old people recently - a teacher of 25 years, and a politician who'd been in politics for about 40 years. Among the good things they said about things getting better; they both said some interesting things:
-Young people are far more verbal, opinionated, and insulting when they converse
-The current trend is that we are becoming more polarized and vocal about our differences instead of honestly trying to find compromises. Comporomises being that we don't either get what we want, but are mutually able to agree on something that's a bit good and a bit bad for both of us.
I think this directly reflects the 'troll' effect on much of the internet. I've even seen it in myself. If I can anonymously, or even not anonymously, fling as much vitriol at another person as I want online without worry of much reprisal; I slowly start carrying it into my own real-life interactions. And since I spend a lot of time online, then I start living more with my online persona then my real-life one that is much more apt to listen and not immediately discount.
Now I'm not saying that this is 100% correlation - I'd also argue societal effects such as teaching all kids they must be winners (i.e. compromise is a gray area or a loser position) and that we're increasingly becoming a society of entitlement. But I don't think people here could deny there is carry-over.
And what are the ethics of online interaction anymore anyway? Do we have any? Should there be any at all? Lase-faire? Clearly things like the cyber-bullying of a kid by his roommmate to post his gay sex video on the internet which lead to his suicide, or other teenage harrasment on facebook sites is a clear example that there are serious real-world consequences to our online interactions.
So, anyone want to discuss this instead?
Remember the old Em:t record label that published a bunch of early electronic music. They're album covers had a picture of some really exotic marine or land life on it. Nice to know they won't be lacking for new album covers - if they ever come back into business...
This is one of the biggest things people forget about with data security and one my professors at school were constantly mindful of. Sure, 2048 bit keys and most modern cryptography is secure right now; but if you have really sensitive data - data about banking accounts, transaction records that your business depends on keeping secret for competitive reasons, voting records, etc - you need that to remain secure for the life-time of the person - or even longer. This is MUCH harder - especially if the advent of quantum computer decryption around the corner. What if all your bank transactions and records for this point up till now became as easily readable as a zip file? What if you live in a country that when the regime changes, those associated with the old regime get 'purged'? Your records are your life in such situations.
Remember, people can be storing up all those encrypted transactions you're sending around - and when the machines are fast enough - unencrypt them years or even decades later to reveal everything you said, did, bought/sold/voted on/etc during those times. This is a perfect example of why you need to take into the account the *lifetime* sensitivity of the data your encrypting, or you could easily face serious consequences.
...it's easy for the author to portray a person in whatever way they choose.
Amen - I hoped that just because someone makes a movie and calls it a 'documentary' that it doesn't mean the folks making it aren't biased. As much as I didn't like Billy Mitchell's banter and seeming lack of maturity/humility - it became painfully obvious what the documentary producers wanted us to take away. Namely, a mild-mannered, underdog family guy from Washington beats a cocky gamer pro. Personally, I was really interested in hearing more from the old lady that was the Q-bert master.:)
While there are some good documentaries out there that do a good job of just trying to present facts (Into Thin Air), Is it just me, or do a lot of the MOST bias groups/individuals choose to use the documentary format as their preferred medium?
I would have voted against anyone that proposed the health care extortion^B plan we had shoved down our throats. Neither the dems or the reps are really fiscally responsible anymore.
We have a medicare/medicade program that is slated to go bankrupt by 2020, and a social security system slated for insolvency around 2030. How in the world do we expect ANOTHER huge spending plan on healthcare to work?
But don't take my word for it - here it is straight from wikipedia:
"According to the 2008 report by the board of trustees for Medicare and Social Security, Medicare will spend more than it brings in from taxes this year (2008). The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund will become insolvent by 2019" Citations on the site
Nobody on either side of the isle has the b*lls to stand up to the coming government services collapse that'll be happening in our lifetimes. Welcome to the housing bubble come to the government bubble.
"Not everyone wants to learn the intricate details of how their OS works, some of them just want to use it. "
For those that want to poo-poo this concept - witness a small 'fruit' company that came into a market saturated and owned completely by dozens of phone vendors with hundreds of commercial phone releases and entrenched service providers. In 5 years it's become the phone of choice. Why? Not because it's based on a unix software, not because it's open, not because it offers choice/DRM-free content/or any other of these niceties. In fact, it does all of these things WRONG - and STILL completely destroys the rest of the market and companies that have done the nice things. Why? Because - really - 99% of the average users just want to play youtube videos, surf the web, post on facebook and have it all supported by some happy fraternety/sorority kids. They could 100% care less about some tech feature-list of a piece of hardware; they want interwebz, youtube clips, instant access to lady gaga's newest music, cool fart apps, and they want it all from one storefront so they don't have to think about. They'll even pay a higher price for the hardware, software, AND DRM'ed content to get it. They. don't. care. about. the. nerd. stuff.
They buy it because it has learned how to be the coolest kid in high school - and everyone wants to be around them. You can hate those kids as much as you want. You can rant against them because they aren't the smartest or fastest. But they are the coolest and/or most beautiful - so they walk charmed lives. Why does this happen? There are reasons and pricinples - but it does - and it will as long as we have human nature; any you better learn that principle as a software engineer if you want to make your own way or start working for someone who does.
I'm a 15 year software professional and I've learned that the race rarely goes to the most 'empirically correct' answer. What good is a solution if nobody uses it? It's got to be written from the standpoint that it *solves a real problem* your users have - and solves in the way *they want/need it solved*. The second you say "well, they should do it this way because..." you have already failed.
Agree it'll push them to MS before open-source; and agree with the original response that the post was written by a open-source troll.
Remember who your average Apple buyer is: rich housewives, kids of upper-middle class that shop at Hollister, not-hugely-geeky tech men who are looking for some image/ease of use. Most of the people that buy Mac's bought them for 1. looks/image, 2. 'easy' to use 3. they could get it at their local mall. Apple users by and large do NOT care about open source or the fact OSX is build on BSD. They don't care what their little iPod/iPad runs on. They know it's cool and they want one. They want someone to drop it off with and fix it if there's any problem. They don't want to think about the device. It's NOT an audience that by-and-large cares about open-source. They just want to get more iTunes, be able to text message, and look cool doing facebook in a coffee shop.
While the tinfoil hats are definitely overblown - I still find your lackadaisical analysis dangerously short-sighted.
It's a total cop-out to say this is 'just another industrial-military complex grab for money and nobody's going to fight a real war anyway'. Oh, there might be elements of it, but you haven't been a very astute student of history, Chinese political posturing, or your military history. Sun Tzu himself said “He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them.”
Simply out-nuking someone isn't an answer. You need a whole bag of reprisal options so you can match the response to the offense. If someone shoots your satellite down or sinks a ship in disputed waters - do you nuke a city? How big a city? How many people are worth a military satellite? Or a communication satellite? Or MTV? Further, you can't let advances like this go without proper counter-measures - or you quickly become backed into a corner. And this plays out in political ways. I hope you see the problem. Just like the US has done, you know you can push without fear of certain kinds of reprisal. While I'm an optimistic guy too, just hoping that the other guy is acting in good faith is a HUGE gamble when your very country and livelihood are on the line. Even if today's govt is ok to deal with, tomorrow's china might be run by a Kim Jong-Il. Just imagine how rational THAT guy would be with the weapons China has...
Well, the first off, PAE only gets you to 64gb of memory. While that should be plenty for most people for the foreseeable future, we all know that setting arbitrary and somewhat lower limits turns you into the most quoted man in history (640k should be enough for everyone....) Also, as I recall, the 64-bit memory manager in Vista was quite a bit different (and faster) than the one in the 32-bit version. Legacy support(?)
However, there is more than just addressable memory to consider with a 64-bit operating system. If you use PAE, your APPS are still running 32 bit. Apps need to be recompiled or even reworked/rewritten to utilize the new 64-bit operating system features. That's probably what they're hoping for more - to get folks to thinking and writing in 64-bit. While I don't think it was a totally cool move - if I'm not mistaken Microsoft has some features available only in the 64-bit api's. In Vista, certain secure driver signing modes didn't exist except in the 64-bit version (not that this is a good thing - they were terrible - but it does show a difference).
After all the other oil companies see the racking over the coals that BP is going to get - YOU BETTER BET that they'll start doing this exact same thing with their risky drilling platforms. Start a seperate company which you 'buy' the oil from in exchange for the amount of money needed for their bare operating costs. Then, if the thing blows up or leaks, you leave the little shell company to pay it all and you walk away with the profits. I'm honestly shocked they aren't doing this now.
How do the classes go? Something like this I imagine:
"Revenge is a dish best served cold - and it's very cold in the vacuum of space. Around 2.725 Kelvin; which is -270 deg Celcius. That is minus 27 tens, and that's terrible....ly cold."
"KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHN!"
Very unprofessional - and very, very short-sighted of Gizmodo which has now damaged tech journalism.
Thought experiment: What was gained/lost in this exchange?
People now know Gizmodo will out your name if they can find out who you were. Instead of just saying, "we know the employee's name and have verified they are in fact an employee of Apple" - that should have sufficed to add all the credibility they needed and a touch of class. Instead, they out the guys name publicly in a move that smacks of high-school nerd dramatics "SEE! We're so clever in our hackery that we can even get the guy's name and publish it all over the inter-webz!"
Results:
They look like a dangerous news outlet. If someone does have a big tech story that requires confidentiality, they'll look at Gizmodo, and possibly tech journalism in general, and think twice about talking to someone that is an outer of names. I certainly wouldn't trust my privacy to these guys now - even if it's the case that I go to them. They have come off very unprofessional and amateurish. Welcome to The Inquirer-level journalism standards Gizmodo - you just hurt your own industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I swear that at times Slashdot feels like a bunch of stuffy comp-sci folks stuck in the 80's. You'll argue day and night about minor technical details, but it's none of those details/minutia that really make a product take off. Sure, flaws will kill a product, but beyond a very simple point, they are just a tool to get a job done. Steve Jobs understood that, maybe we should too and stop the language circle-jerks.
Finding *qualified* candidates is the key phrase. We get lots of interviews from recent graduates, but many of us lament at how bad a great number of them are. The ones that went to U of Pheonix or other trade schools are just not suitable as systems coders (jobs we pay very well for). I don't know if it's universities failing to educate, or standards going up. I would guess a little of both. We need device driver writers, multithreaded system programers, graphics, etc, and it's very hard to find event experienced coders that are good at that. Most fail our screenings. It's not good enough anymore just to show up with a sheepskin in CS. You need to demonstrate you can actually build and debug something. For candidates that show initiative with personal projects and can demonstrate solid coding/debugging and can talk intelligently about architecture - we'll hire you in a MINUTE with some of the highest salaries in the industry. If you can't, then you're one of the 10,000 other global coders anyone can get. We do hiring lots of promising newbies all the time - but they have to show that initial spark and understanding at least. You can't just show up and be gimme a job cause I got a diploma.
I think this brings us to a great career point. You don't want to be floating in the middle as one of the masses in engineering - following just the trend lines. Sure, you need relevant skills so don't run out and become the ADA expert; but perhaps an example. If you were a Java/web coder in the very early 2000's when the bubble popped - a great number of those people never found work again and left the field. I felt bad for all the CS grads from my school that had just taught them Java (they don't know, they primarily teach C/C++ again and now we hire them). Unfortunately, when you're part of the big crowd, you're career and pay is driven much by the crowd and you must be really, really exceptional to stand out.
What will make you OODLES of money in engineering is being a master of certain much needed, but not well peopled, technique. I knew several guys that were above average coders but commanded insane amounts of money to come in and deliver a certain kind of feature. They went the contracting themselves out route and simply re-regurgitated the 1 of the 5 or so techniques they had implemented for this task really well, picked up a fat check, wash, rinse and repeat. I know personally of at least 2 different sets of people doing this with 2 completely different technologies. Sure, every year or two needed to spend some time updating and revamping the codebase, but they worked about 2-3 jobs a year and then took 3-6 mo off - and made large 6-figure salaries. Those are the people that get rich in engineering. You simply won't get rich working for a company unless you've got some kind of share of the sales.
So it is possible to get a job even as a new grad, but you need to stand out more now than before.
Amen sitkill - this has been my experience too. I'm absolutely no Apple fan - but the amount of anti-iPhone FUD on this thread is pretty terrible and continues a line of denial I've seen again and again. I've developed commercially for Android, Win7Phone, and yes, iPhone. When I test an app for Apple, I need *at most* 2 iPad's and 2-3 different iPhones. When I test for Android or Win7Phone, I need a box full of phones. Each one has a slightly different conrtrol layout, slightly different sensitivities, driver and version bugs, power-sucking hot paths, etc. How anyone can say it's as easy to validate for a Google phone market as it is for iPhone has no idea what they are talking about. Sure anybody can *develop* an app that should work just fine on any of those devices, but the reality is when you have a revenue stream on the line, you absolutely must validate it. In a marketplace where people will delete and badmouth your app if you so much as simply use their battery badly (let alone bugs or usability issues), you can't afford to live in an ivory palace. This is a huge problem for both Google and Win7/8 phones. It's certainly an additional cost to developers and I can only see a few solutions: 1. Common platform - require the use of one or only a few chip vendors and hardware mfcts with validated hardware/driver stacks 2. Simulators that can mimic all the hardware out there and all the driver stacks/OS versions and tell you of upcoming problems with power issues, rendering bugs, etc. 3. A defined set of control layouts garanteed to give good perf/responses and a means of changing control schemes in your game to whatever the user wants. This should help, but it sure seems like a very tall order to me since Google already has a slew of OS drops out there and some pretty badly behaving phone vendors racing to the bottom on some of their models.
It helps if you have 3 months salary in reserve for emergencies like you should so you don't end up entering a bad situation out of desperation.
Currently, I would recommend people have 6-12 months saved up. Jobs report in August said the AVERAGE length of unemployment is 40.4 weeks. Granted, that's including all industries; but the reality is that it's worse out there than people think.
What about this: Since they're taking photos from multiple 'flashes' of the illuminating laser over time - conceptually - shouldn't the quantum properties of light bending/scattering be visible?
What if we used this to shoot the standard diffraction grating quantum experiment or other examples of strange quantum properties. Would we see frame-to-frame quantum discontinuities based on when the sampling occurred?
Again proving there are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary, and those that don't.
And they want their rash idealism back.
Remember how EVERYTHING was going to be free? Free information, free software, free everything. Didn't quite work out for good reasons, and now we've moved on. He clearly hasn't. While I agree with him that cel phones are a good way to be tracked, I also know that if I ever *need* to hide from the government, I can put that fully charged cel phone on the back of a UPS semi and get a pay-as-you go.
As others have said, his brand of 'freedom' sounds more like a blend of wishful thinking and paranoia.
I have a 3GS, and with the last 4 or so updates from Apple, it's been consistently getting slower and slower across the board. Slower response times when starting/closing apps/keyboard trays, slower browsing, and most notably - slower than HECK at starting the camera app. Anyone else notice how horribly long it takes to start the app and take the first photo sometimes? That never happened before.
I'm almost certain at this point that they're trying to 'force' upgrades to the new iPhone 4 by making their old devices slower. Sure it sounds conspiracy theory; but I've already seen a lot of it happening. It's already been proven by the jail-braker guys that the 3GS can do HDR photography just like the 4G with just the flip of a single registry bit. The iOS SDK also supposedly required the new version of Snow Leopard OS, unless you also flipped a hidden registry bit and it worked fine on the old OS.
And with my tinfoil hat on, I also notice there is no way to roll back your iPhone to an earlier version of iOS so I could do some timed comparisons. In fact, given my choice, I'd roll back to right before they introduced multithreading - which really seemed to do nothing other than slow my phone down and show that I'm only getting half the bars I used too (if you remember that fiasco).
I'm using UEFI on my new Sandybridge system right now - and MAN is it nicer. Booting on partitions larger than 2TB is probably one of the biggest wins now that 3TB drives are shipping (CMOS is limited to 2TB boot partitions). The GUI display with ability to use keyboard+mouse right away is very nice. It's also SO overdue that looking at older bios' makes me cringe. Really? Text setup with what looks like old BBS color schemes? Am I setting up by modem still? Sure they had the degrading SATA controller bug, but it's fixed and now and my board hasn't shown any signs of the problem anyway since I'm using the 6gb/s ports (my free cross-shipped replacement board is due any day now anyway).
DRM will always be cracked. You are not stopping pirates.
I agree, but it's getting MUCH more difficult to crack things. The days of some skript kiddie with SoftICE or the like reverse-engineering something are almost, if not already, gone. The latest consoles were hacked by teams of security experts over the courses of months and that time-frame isn't getting much shorter. Some security like Microsoft's elliptical encryption on their media files has never been cracked - only circumvented when you already have the key. I fear that soon there will only be MS/PhD level folks able to break these schemes, and with such a small pool of that kind of talent, they could quickly shut down or make such activities so painful legally they stop. Then things WON'T be cracked anymore. After all, if you're a genius-level computer scientists, do you really want to risk it all to get free movies? There will always be ideological folks, but that' usually not the majority who have mortgages, wives, and kids.
And just like an Apple product - everyone will buy and use anyway.
The cars! The cars! They run on people! They RUN ON PEOPLEEEEEEEEE!!!
Or,
"No no, this corvette doesn't need gas! It runs on the fat of the land!"
Good observation - but I'd argue that if your customer/user even NEEDS to know to check about a 'device driver' then you've completely failed to grasp why Apple wins the customer again and again.
People want/need/deserve computers and operating systems that work FOR them - not the other way around. There's a real, and big shift going on that I hope we as developers are realizing.
We're moving to mobile devices increasingly - the desktop is dying in every metric of sales. Heck, even laptops are beginning to be affected by smart phones, ipads, and netbooks. Desktops will always be needed for content creation, laptops also - but the shares of sales are radically changing. In those new mobile environments, the ones that are really winning are the ones that are providing very simple black boxes that get me on the web, email, and watching videos. The user is even willing to pay *more* for crummy DRM'ed content provided that they get Lady Gaga in a really simple interface and can easily play it. To make these things easier in general for the first-time device user, this means you *constrain* the path of purchase/use so that it is easy to work out. Sure it's not configurable and you're locked into one platform - but nobody cares so long as it looks cool, can easily be done, and works on other things in that line. The fact it won't work on another users platform doesn't become a factor until well AFTER the person has plunked down all the money. Yes, this is crummy - but it's the truth.
Internally, this means we're starting to move back to vertical stacks a la the old 70's Sun/IBM/DEC days. The users of small/mobile devices increasingly want SOLUTIONS not tons of confusing CHOICES that they need to read about/learn about. While choices and options are empirically better - the hidden quality is that people actually value their time/image and the desire NOT to have to learn all kinds of technical details or walk around with stupid looking devices that look like a teenagers tricked out rice rocket. They're willing to pay more NOT to have to know about any of the details.
What we as nerds forget is there is other currency besides features and ideology. There is time and social stigma - and these are much more important to the end user. If you're in a social situation and you want to buy/play a song or show someone a video; if you have to go "here we go! Oh, wait a second. Ummm, lemmie configure this codec, etc..." vs. "Here's this youtube video....lol" What a difference! That second example shows how you just built social currency and valued the users TIME - the first shot down the whole moment, wasted their time, added frustration, and made the person appear foolish to their friends/business associates. I think we often forget this 'soft' factor is FAR more important to the user than most other factors.
And after all - we invented computers to do work FOR us, not that we bend ourselves to their needs. That might have been true back in the day, but there's no excuse for having to think the way the computer wants things anymore. It's a big mental shift - but one we as developers better get used too.
I find this topic fascinating - and with a modicum of truth behind it. I was listening to 2 different discussions by old people recently - a teacher of 25 years, and a politician who'd been in politics for about 40 years. Among the good things they said about things getting better; they both said some interesting things:
-Young people are far more verbal, opinionated, and insulting when they converse
-The current trend is that we are becoming more polarized and vocal about our differences instead of honestly trying to find compromises. Comporomises being that we don't either get what we want, but are mutually able to agree on something that's a bit good and a bit bad for both of us.
I think this directly reflects the 'troll' effect on much of the internet. I've even seen it in myself. If I can anonymously, or even not anonymously, fling as much vitriol at another person as I want online without worry of much reprisal; I slowly start carrying it into my own real-life interactions. And since I spend a lot of time online, then I start living more with my online persona then my real-life one that is much more apt to listen and not immediately discount.
Now I'm not saying that this is 100% correlation - I'd also argue societal effects such as teaching all kids they must be winners (i.e. compromise is a gray area or a loser position) and that we're increasingly becoming a society of entitlement. But I don't think people here could deny there is carry-over. And what are the ethics of online interaction anymore anyway? Do we have any? Should there be any at all? Lase-faire? Clearly things like the cyber-bullying of a kid by his roommmate to post his gay sex video on the internet which lead to his suicide, or other teenage harrasment on facebook sites is a clear example that there are serious real-world consequences to our online interactions. So, anyone want to discuss this instead?
Remember the old Em:t record label that published a bunch of early electronic music. They're album covers had a picture of some really exotic marine or land life on it. Nice to know they won't be lacking for new album covers - if they ever come back into business...
This is one of the biggest things people forget about with data security and one my professors at school were constantly mindful of. Sure, 2048 bit keys and most modern cryptography is secure right now; but if you have really sensitive data - data about banking accounts, transaction records that your business depends on keeping secret for competitive reasons, voting records, etc - you need that to remain secure for the life-time of the person - or even longer. This is MUCH harder - especially if the advent of quantum computer decryption around the corner. What if all your bank transactions and records for this point up till now became as easily readable as a zip file? What if you live in a country that when the regime changes, those associated with the old regime get 'purged'? Your records are your life in such situations.
Remember, people can be storing up all those encrypted transactions you're sending around - and when the machines are fast enough - unencrypt them years or even decades later to reveal everything you said, did, bought/sold/voted on/etc during those times. This is a perfect example of why you need to take into the account the *lifetime* sensitivity of the data your encrypting, or you could easily face serious consequences.
Amen - I hoped that just because someone makes a movie and calls it a 'documentary' that it doesn't mean the folks making it aren't biased. As much as I didn't like Billy Mitchell's banter and seeming lack of maturity/humility - it became painfully obvious what the documentary producers wanted us to take away. Namely, a mild-mannered, underdog family guy from Washington beats a cocky gamer pro. Personally, I was really interested in hearing more from the old lady that was the Q-bert master. :)
While there are some good documentaries out there that do a good job of just trying to present facts (Into Thin Air), Is it just me, or do a lot of the MOST bias groups/individuals choose to use the documentary format as their preferred medium?
I would have voted against anyone that proposed the health care extortion^B plan we had shoved down our throats. Neither the dems or the reps are really fiscally responsible anymore.
We have a medicare/medicade program that is slated to go bankrupt by 2020, and a social security system slated for insolvency around 2030. How in the world do we expect ANOTHER huge spending plan on healthcare to work?
But don't take my word for it - here it is straight from wikipedia: "According to the 2008 report by the board of trustees for Medicare and Social Security, Medicare will spend more than it brings in from taxes this year (2008). The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund will become insolvent by 2019" Citations on the site
Nobody on either side of the isle has the b*lls to stand up to the coming government services collapse that'll be happening in our lifetimes. Welcome to the housing bubble come to the government bubble.
"Not everyone wants to learn the intricate details of how their OS works, some of them just want to use it. "
For those that want to poo-poo this concept - witness a small 'fruit' company that came into a market saturated and owned completely by dozens of phone vendors with hundreds of commercial phone releases and entrenched service providers. In 5 years it's become the phone of choice. Why? Not because it's based on a unix software, not because it's open, not because it offers choice/DRM-free content/or any other of these niceties. In fact, it does all of these things WRONG - and STILL completely destroys the rest of the market and companies that have done the nice things. Why? Because - really - 99% of the average users just want to play youtube videos, surf the web, post on facebook and have it all supported by some happy fraternety/sorority kids. They could 100% care less about some tech feature-list of a piece of hardware; they want interwebz, youtube clips, instant access to lady gaga's newest music, cool fart apps, and they want it all from one storefront so they don't have to think about. They'll even pay a higher price for the hardware, software, AND DRM'ed content to get it. They. don't. care. about. the. nerd. stuff.
They buy it because it has learned how to be the coolest kid in high school - and everyone wants to be around them. You can hate those kids as much as you want. You can rant against them because they aren't the smartest or fastest. But they are the coolest and/or most beautiful - so they walk charmed lives. Why does this happen? There are reasons and pricinples - but it does - and it will as long as we have human nature; any you better learn that principle as a software engineer if you want to make your own way or start working for someone who does.
I'm a 15 year software professional and I've learned that the race rarely goes to the most 'empirically correct' answer. What good is a solution if nobody uses it? It's got to be written from the standpoint that it *solves a real problem* your users have - and solves in the way *they want/need it solved*. The second you say "well, they should do it this way because..." you have already failed.
Remember who your average Apple buyer is: rich housewives, kids of upper-middle class that shop at Hollister, not-hugely-geeky tech men who are looking for some image/ease of use. Most of the people that buy Mac's bought them for 1. looks/image, 2. 'easy' to use 3. they could get it at their local mall. Apple users by and large do NOT care about open source or the fact OSX is build on BSD. They don't care what their little iPod/iPad runs on. They know it's cool and they want one. They want someone to drop it off with and fix it if there's any problem. They don't want to think about the device. It's NOT an audience that by-and-large cares about open-source. They just want to get more iTunes, be able to text message, and look cool doing facebook in a coffee shop.
While the tinfoil hats are definitely overblown - I still find your lackadaisical analysis dangerously short-sighted. It's a total cop-out to say this is 'just another industrial-military complex grab for money and nobody's going to fight a real war anyway'. Oh, there might be elements of it, but you haven't been a very astute student of history, Chinese political posturing, or your military history. Sun Tzu himself said “He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them.” Simply out-nuking someone isn't an answer. You need a whole bag of reprisal options so you can match the response to the offense. If someone shoots your satellite down or sinks a ship in disputed waters - do you nuke a city? How big a city? How many people are worth a military satellite? Or a communication satellite? Or MTV? Further, you can't let advances like this go without proper counter-measures - or you quickly become backed into a corner. And this plays out in political ways. I hope you see the problem. Just like the US has done, you know you can push without fear of certain kinds of reprisal. While I'm an optimistic guy too, just hoping that the other guy is acting in good faith is a HUGE gamble when your very country and livelihood are on the line. Even if today's govt is ok to deal with, tomorrow's china might be run by a Kim Jong-Il. Just imagine how rational THAT guy would be with the weapons China has...
Well, the first off, PAE only gets you to 64gb of memory. While that should be plenty for most people for the foreseeable future, we all know that setting arbitrary and somewhat lower limits turns you into the most quoted man in history (640k should be enough for everyone....) Also, as I recall, the 64-bit memory manager in Vista was quite a bit different (and faster) than the one in the 32-bit version. Legacy support(?) However, there is more than just addressable memory to consider with a 64-bit operating system. If you use PAE, your APPS are still running 32 bit. Apps need to be recompiled or even reworked/rewritten to utilize the new 64-bit operating system features. That's probably what they're hoping for more - to get folks to thinking and writing in 64-bit. While I don't think it was a totally cool move - if I'm not mistaken Microsoft has some features available only in the 64-bit api's. In Vista, certain secure driver signing modes didn't exist except in the 64-bit version (not that this is a good thing - they were terrible - but it does show a difference).
After all the other oil companies see the racking over the coals that BP is going to get - YOU BETTER BET that they'll start doing this exact same thing with their risky drilling platforms. Start a seperate company which you 'buy' the oil from in exchange for the amount of money needed for their bare operating costs. Then, if the thing blows up or leaks, you leave the little shell company to pay it all and you walk away with the profits. I'm honestly shocked they aren't doing this now.
"Revenge is a dish best served cold - and it's very cold in the vacuum of space. Around 2.725 Kelvin; which is -270 deg Celcius. That is minus 27 tens, and that's terrible....ly cold."
"KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHN!"
Now that's a school I could go for...
Very unprofessional - and very, very short-sighted of Gizmodo which has now damaged tech journalism.
Thought experiment: What was gained/lost in this exchange?
People now know Gizmodo will out your name if they can find out who you were. Instead of just saying, "we know the employee's name and have verified they are in fact an employee of Apple" - that should have sufficed to add all the credibility they needed and a touch of class. Instead, they out the guys name publicly in a move that smacks of high-school nerd dramatics "SEE! We're so clever in our hackery that we can even get the guy's name and publish it all over the inter-webz!"
Results:
They look like a dangerous news outlet. If someone does have a big tech story that requires confidentiality, they'll look at Gizmodo, and possibly tech journalism in general, and think twice about talking to someone that is an outer of names. I certainly wouldn't trust my privacy to these guys now - even if it's the case that I go to them. They have come off very unprofessional and amateurish. Welcome to The Inquirer-level journalism standards Gizmodo - you just hurt your own industry.