Especially since knowledge management is ever increasingly done by machines. Even some tasks which used to require human intelligence like voice recognition or eyeball inspections of produced goods can now be automated. What's left? Making clay pots and selling them? Or perhaps tulips...
Don't be an idiot. The more people we have, the higher the rate of technological advancement will happen. Humans are the ultimate resource. Without people eventually development would stagnate or even reverse itself. It has happened before when there were large population implosions (fall of the Roman Empire, Black Death, etc).
Not to mention that central banks still have a lot of gold. One of the reasons gold was undervalued in the 1990s was that the central banks sold some of their reserves to shore up the fiat currencies. They could do it again. Or they could start confiscating gold like it was done before and during WWII.
Historically the stock market has about the same returns as investing in treasury bonds if you use stocks as a long term investment. You can attempt to micromanage things to milk out more than the treasury bonds, but more likely than not you will be hit by a downturn which wipes out most of your initial gains.
I am still trying to figure out their business model. It seems they make money on selling other people's private information. But as people keep putting less and less information on Facebook it is hard to see where all that cash is going to come from. In comparison other companies which actually are making physical products like Tesla or FirstSolar do not get all this cash from an IPO. This is just another bubble waiting to burst and to me it seems these people are playing shell games with the market. The valuation of the stock is simply obscene. The founder got a lot of cash, if I was the founder I would try to offload all the stock I could and run with the money before everyone catches the fact that they are throwing money on a lot of hot air.
Actually COTS started during Bush's second term while Griffin (author of the pork launcher called Ares) was head of NASA. So yeah even that team made correct decisions on occasion. Obama proposed to increase funding but it seems the congress critters are not interested in inexpensive commercial spaceflight.
The US stopped being the major launch provider for several reasons. Uncompetitive/unresponsive launch vehicles is one of them. ITAR was kind of the nail in the coffin. Much easier to build your satellites in Europe and launch them with a Russian rocket. The Russians don't care which country you are from as long as you pay pretty much.
No it's not irrelevant. When congress mandates which technical solution (and contractors) the agency should use to solve a problem you know something is seriously wrong.
Actually SpaceX does save a lot on costs from being vertically integrated. If you read Carmack's posts about his experience with Armadillo you would figure out why. The contractors charge obscene prices just because something is for an aerospace application.
SpaceX also has a particularly good rocket design. Try listing the number of two stage to orbit launch vehicles (which launch to GTO) using Lox/Kerosene as a propellant. Even Zenith uses three stages, while Soyuz has parallel staging (0th level stages). This despite Zenith having supposedly superior engines in the first stage which use a much more advanced staged combustion design. The fact is SpaceX did good work with the vehicle making the stages extremely light compared to what is commonly used in the industry. The engines, particularly the latest version, are also well optimized despite using something which is considered old technology by now (gas generator cycle). They have a very high T/W ratio for a first stage and the second stage manages to be good enough to have this kind of performance despite the fact that it is the same engine with a different nozzle and minor tweaking.
Wouldn't it be great if the first revision of anything worked 100% fine at the time of release without any bugs? Adobe probably just didn't want to be the test subjects of it. So they procrastinated as long as they could until the tools were up to shape. Even then I wouldn't be surprised if the tools still had bugs in them by the time they did a port.
Quark is not Adobe. You just need to see how much time it took for them to release a Windows port to see the difference.
The PowerPC transition wasn't done when Steve Jobs was around (so they did do some things right then) but yeah they did manage to make CPU emulation work to keep the older apps back then. However this was nothing that hadn't been done elsewhere. Windows NT for Alpha also ran x86 apps at good performance. The main difference was that the 68k was utterly obsolete performance wise by that time while the Pentium Pro vs Alpha 21164 was not a clear win for either way if you ran integer code like most applications do. Emulation of x86 on Alpha was hence a much harder problem to solve and users never quite got over the fact they were using a more expensive platform which ran their old software slower than a cheaper x86 processor would do..
The classic emulation at first was little more than running an emulator box inside MacOS X. It was very crude at first. If I remember correctly you could not even cut & paste properly and everything ran in a separate screen. You effectively had a separate MacOS Classic instance running. It was much more cumbersome for the users than the PowerPC transition. Hence the outcry from users who required Cocoa apps in the first place. The Classic apps ran in a second class environment in MacOS X.
I have helped people who do MacOS X development. The need to release new binaries every time there is a major revision is hardly rare or anything. They had to do it so frequently even they got pissed off from working on it (and these were hardcore Apple users/developers). Sure Apple has fat binaries so probably you don't notice someone has compiled several different instances of the code to run on different OS versions and hardware platforms. But the people who work on the code either do it, or it stops working eventually.
You don't understand do you? Do you even know jack shit about programming? Adobe had their entire codebase in C++. They still do. You could not mix Objective-C code (which is what Cocoa is) with C++ code (Adobe's code) in the same file. Carbon was written in C which can be mixed with C++ in the same file. It was a wrapper to Cocoa. Apple dropped it just to thumb their nose at Adobe apparently. Adobe weren't the only ones complaining at the time. Had Apple actually listened to app developers they would have introduced Objective-C++ before dropping Carbon instead of doing things the other way around. Apple is notorious for breaking backwards compatibility and then they jest about Android being fragmented. What a joke! I cannot use Stanza ever since I upgraded to iOS 4 because they broke the binary. Which is kind of interesting since it competed with iBooks for free and had IMO a better interface and easier access to public domain books. On MacOS X you need to release a new binary like every time there is a major OS upgrade.
I do not see you doing any math to disprove my point regarding iPod vs iPhone costs...
So basically you agree that it is a stupid idea not to be able to have full control of the storage space.
Google used KHTML as well. Oh yeah now people prefer to call it Webkit. But they do not only open source the HTML rendering portions they changed and were forced according to the license, they also open sourced the browser itself which was not mandatory to open source. People who put their code under the BSD license are only reaping what they sow. Simple as that. It's their choice to use such a permissive license. I was just making clear that I would not release code under that license and for that case neither will many other individuals and even corporations. It seems to be in fashion to bash the GPL but most of us in the business know otherwise. FYI I code for hire so I could care less about selling software. Most of the clients I have worked for develop software in-house for use in their own machines. People pay me to create something, not to make copies or sell licenses. Of course some people always like to have something for nothing, how do you think Apple manages to get these profits? They are the DRM middlemen of digital media distribution. Their main competitor at this point is not even Google, it's Amazon.
Motorola and IBM developed the PowerPC series at Apple's request given a certain set of conditions. Apple by itself could not fund the development of a family of CPUs. Let alone two implementations by separate vendors. The deal was that Apple would open up the hardware platform and sell MacOS as one of the OSes that users could install so the market would be larger. Of course since Apple couldn't produce hardware worth a damn as usual (Steve Jobs once told the CBM Amiga designers that the flaw of their design was that it had "too much hardware") the competition easily captured a huge share of the PowerPC market (UMAX, Power Computing, etc). When Steve Jobs came back to Apple the first thing he did was cancel all those licenses and pursue anyone selling the PReP or CHRP standard compliant hardware products. Apple's profits rose because they became a monopoly in that segment again, while Motorola and IBM had their target market of tens of millions CPUs sold per year shrink to millions or hundreds of thousands. So yeah they were shafted and x86 won as a consequence. If you do not sell enough CPUs you do not have the profit to do the R&D on better products later on. It is something of a minor miracle how IBM manages to custom design so many different PowerPC implementations for the consoles today (which do sell in the tens of millions). That is an expertise other people in the segment do not seem to have.
Microsoft got sued for doing pretty much the same thing Apple did which was to copy someone else's GUI. Bill Gates gave Apple the money after Jobs came back to Apple because at the time he was still involved in an anti-trust case and he need to prop up some competition. He also probably thought the investment would pay itself back which it did.
Adobe was shafted by Apple more than once. Apple started competing with Adobe on products directly while disabling Carbon. Since Adobe has their code base in C++ and not Objective-C they could not easily switch to Cocoa even if they wanted to. Most of their customers used Windows and they wanted to share the development costs using the same code base. They only were able to do it much later after Apple released Objective-C++ and by that time they lost a lot of the market. It is easy for Mac apologists to say Adobe was the villain here, but the fact is they weren't. I won't even get started with Flash on iOS because the argument is complete bunk. Lots of software is a performance hog, yet if it is useful people use it. The choice should be user's not the hardware vendor's. Just one more thing that shows how closed that environment is. An environment which is now moving elsewhere. Apple already has an app store for MacOS X and Microsoft is doing the same thing with their new and crappy Windows phones nobody wants. I now make it a point not to buy any further Apple products. My tablet runs Android and my next phone will certainly not be running iOS.
There is one point where it would be interesting to have common code and that would be the OpenGL base implementation and drivers (which is based on LLVM). Yet I have never seen any opening in that front from Apple. It means on the Linux side everything needs to be reimplemented including OpenCL support and compilers. As usual if the Linux implementation proves to eventually be better than their own they will have no qualms with using it. Wouldn't even be surprised if they sued these same people who worked on that code despite it being an open standard.
Even Google contributes cash back to Mozilla in return for search advertisements because they know they are increasing their user base this way even after they developed their own open source browser. The least Apple could do is to have OSS specific programmers on their staff like Intel has. But of course Apple does not think in this way. They could care less. They no longer are a hardware company.
Apple are a bunch of shitheads because even if they release their source code back they produce crippled devices which are not meant to empower the user to use the hardware to its fullest extent but to line their pockets instead. Differences between iPod and iPhone? One antenna. Difference in price to the consumer? Over a hundred bucks. Price of an antenna? $1? $2? They have devices with multiple GB of storage which you cannot access as a regular storage device because of DRM and because it would obliterate their nice walled garden. You could actually install your own app in the device, heck even develop apps in the device, without going through the Apple anointed way. They are a bunch of control freaks even worse than Microsoft. They use open source software out of necessity for now, but it remains to be seen what will happen in the future. Apple is well known for shafting every other company they have dealt with including Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Motorola which weren't exactly coir boys to begin with either.
Nah, turning the other cheek is for chums. These people certainly do not think that way. It will be interesting to see how Apple is fairing one or two decades from now.
You probably feel fine when you are in a ticket line and someone steps on your feet to get ahead in the queue while saying "sorry" but I certainly do not.
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Especially since knowledge management is ever increasingly done by machines. Even some tasks which used to require human intelligence like voice recognition or eyeball inspections of produced goods can now be automated. What's left? Making clay pots and selling them? Or perhaps tulips...
If someone else owns the machines do they owe you anything? This is not some sort of socialist paradise.
Don't be an idiot. The more people we have, the higher the rate of technological advancement will happen. Humans are the ultimate resource. Without people eventually development would stagnate or even reverse itself. It has happened before when there were large population implosions (fall of the Roman Empire, Black Death, etc).
Any computer hardware is a rapidly depreciating asset to begin with.
Yeah and when they get into trouble they get the government to bail them out.
Not to mention that central banks still have a lot of gold. One of the reasons gold was undervalued in the 1990s was that the central banks sold some of their reserves to shore up the fiat currencies. They could do it again. Or they could start confiscating gold like it was done before and during WWII.
Historically the stock market has about the same returns as investing in treasury bonds if you use stocks as a long term investment. You can attempt to micromanage things to milk out more than the treasury bonds, but more likely than not you will be hit by a downturn which wipes out most of your initial gains.
Yeah but Facebook seems more like a malinvestment than a proper investment.
I am still trying to figure out their business model. It seems they make money on selling other people's private information. But as people keep putting less and less information on Facebook it is hard to see where all that cash is going to come from. In comparison other companies which actually are making physical products like Tesla or FirstSolar do not get all this cash from an IPO. This is just another bubble waiting to burst and to me it seems these people are playing shell games with the market. The valuation of the stock is simply obscene. The founder got a lot of cash, if I was the founder I would try to offload all the stock I could and run with the money before everyone catches the fact that they are throwing money on a lot of hot air.
I'm putting my dime on beam powered propulsion for putting payloads into Earth orbit. For everything else in near space its probably solar-electric.
Yeah the radars are French and the rest is probably under so many shell companies you couldn't fathom who owns them.
Actually COTS started during Bush's second term while Griffin (author of the pork launcher called Ares) was head of NASA. So yeah even that team made correct decisions on occasion. Obama proposed to increase funding but it seems the congress critters are not interested in inexpensive commercial spaceflight.
The US stopped being the major launch provider for several reasons. Uncompetitive/unresponsive launch vehicles is one of them. ITAR was kind of the nail in the coffin. Much easier to build your satellites in Europe and launch them with a Russian rocket. The Russians don't care which country you are from as long as you pay pretty much.
No it's not irrelevant. When congress mandates which technical solution (and contractors) the agency should use to solve a problem you know something is seriously wrong.
Actually SpaceX does save a lot on costs from being vertically integrated. If you read Carmack's posts about his experience with Armadillo you would figure out why. The contractors charge obscene prices just because something is for an aerospace application.
SpaceX also has a particularly good rocket design. Try listing the number of two stage to orbit launch vehicles (which launch to GTO) using Lox/Kerosene as a propellant. Even Zenith uses three stages, while Soyuz has parallel staging (0th level stages). This despite Zenith having supposedly superior engines in the first stage which use a much more advanced staged combustion design. The fact is SpaceX did good work with the vehicle making the stages extremely light compared to what is commonly used in the industry. The engines, particularly the latest version, are also well optimized despite using something which is considered old technology by now (gas generator cycle). They have a very high T/W ratio for a first stage and the second stage manages to be good enough to have this kind of performance despite the fact that it is the same engine with a different nozzle and minor tweaking.
I prefer this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astute_class_submarine
Wouldn't it be great if the first revision of anything worked 100% fine at the time of release without any bugs? Adobe probably just didn't want to be the test subjects of it. So they procrastinated as long as they could until the tools were up to shape. Even then I wouldn't be surprised if the tools still had bugs in them by the time they did a port.
Quark is not Adobe. You just need to see how much time it took for them to release a Windows port to see the difference.
The PowerPC transition wasn't done when Steve Jobs was around (so they did do some things right then) but yeah they did manage to make CPU emulation work to keep the older apps back then. However this was nothing that hadn't been done elsewhere. Windows NT for Alpha also ran x86 apps at good performance. The main difference was that the 68k was utterly obsolete performance wise by that time while the Pentium Pro vs Alpha 21164 was not a clear win for either way if you ran integer code like most applications do. Emulation of x86 on Alpha was hence a much harder problem to solve and users never quite got over the fact they were using a more expensive platform which ran their old software slower than a cheaper x86 processor would do..
The classic emulation at first was little more than running an emulator box inside MacOS X. It was very crude at first. If I remember correctly you could not even cut & paste properly and everything ran in a separate screen. You effectively had a separate MacOS Classic instance running. It was much more cumbersome for the users than the PowerPC transition. Hence the outcry from users who required Cocoa apps in the first place. The Classic apps ran in a second class environment in MacOS X.
I have helped people who do MacOS X development. The need to release new binaries every time there is a major revision is hardly rare or anything. They had to do it so frequently even they got pissed off from working on it (and these were hardcore Apple users/developers). Sure Apple has fat binaries so probably you don't notice someone has compiled several different instances of the code to run on different OS versions and hardware platforms. But the people who work on the code either do it, or it stops working eventually.
You don't understand do you? Do you even know jack shit about programming? Adobe had their entire codebase in C++. They still do. You could not mix Objective-C code (which is what Cocoa is) with C++ code (Adobe's code) in the same file. Carbon was written in C which can be mixed with C++ in the same file. It was a wrapper to Cocoa. Apple dropped it just to thumb their nose at Adobe apparently. Adobe weren't the only ones complaining at the time. Had Apple actually listened to app developers they would have introduced Objective-C++ before dropping Carbon instead of doing things the other way around. Apple is notorious for breaking backwards compatibility and then they jest about Android being fragmented. What a joke! I cannot use Stanza ever since I upgraded to iOS 4 because they broke the binary. Which is kind of interesting since it competed with iBooks for free and had IMO a better interface and easier access to public domain books. On MacOS X you need to release a new binary like every time there is a major OS upgrade.
I do not see you doing any math to disprove my point regarding iPod vs iPhone costs...
So basically you agree that it is a stupid idea not to be able to have full control of the storage space.
Google used KHTML as well. Oh yeah now people prefer to call it Webkit. But they do not only open source the HTML rendering portions they changed and were forced according to the license, they also open sourced the browser itself which was not mandatory to open source. People who put their code under the BSD license are only reaping what they sow. Simple as that. It's their choice to use such a permissive license. I was just making clear that I would not release code under that license and for that case neither will many other individuals and even corporations. It seems to be in fashion to bash the GPL but most of us in the business know otherwise. FYI I code for hire so I could care less about selling software. Most of the clients I have worked for develop software in-house for use in their own machines. People pay me to create something, not to make copies or sell licenses. Of course some people always like to have something for nothing, how do you think Apple manages to get these profits? They are the DRM middlemen of digital media distribution. Their main competitor at this point is not even Google, it's Amazon.
Motorola and IBM developed the PowerPC series at Apple's request given a certain set of conditions. Apple by itself could not fund the development of a family of CPUs. Let alone two implementations by separate vendors. The deal was that Apple would open up the hardware platform and sell MacOS as one of the OSes that users could install so the market would be larger. Of course since Apple couldn't produce hardware worth a damn as usual (Steve Jobs once told the CBM Amiga designers that the flaw of their design was that it had "too much hardware") the competition easily captured a huge share of the PowerPC market (UMAX, Power Computing, etc). When Steve Jobs came back to Apple the first thing he did was cancel all those licenses and pursue anyone selling the PReP or CHRP standard compliant hardware products. Apple's profits rose because they became a monopoly in that segment again, while Motorola and IBM had their target market of tens of millions CPUs sold per year shrink to millions or hundreds of thousands. So yeah they were shafted and x86 won as a consequence. If you do not sell enough CPUs you do not have the profit to do the R&D on better products later on. It is something of a minor miracle how IBM manages to custom design so many different PowerPC implementations for the consoles today (which do sell in the tens of millions). That is an expertise other people in the segment do not seem to have.
Microsoft got sued for doing pretty much the same thing Apple did which was to copy someone else's GUI. Bill Gates gave Apple the money after Jobs came back to Apple because at the time he was still involved in an anti-trust case and he need to prop up some competition. He also probably thought the investment would pay itself back which it did.
Adobe was shafted by Apple more than once. Apple started competing with Adobe on products directly while disabling Carbon. Since Adobe has their code base in C++ and not Objective-C they could not easily switch to Cocoa even if they wanted to. Most of their customers used Windows and they wanted to share the development costs using the same code base. They only were able to do it much later after Apple released Objective-C++ and by that time they lost a lot of the market. It is easy for Mac apologists to say Adobe was the villain here, but the fact is they weren't. I won't even get started with Flash on iOS because the argument is complete bunk. Lots of software is a performance hog, yet if it is useful people use it. The choice should be user's not the hardware vendor's. Just one more thing that shows how closed that environment is. An environment which is now moving elsewhere. Apple already has an app store for MacOS X and Microsoft is doing the same thing with their new and crappy Windows phones nobody wants. I now make it a point not to buy any further Apple products. My tablet runs Android and my next phone will certainly not be running iOS.
I guess you never saw a C-64, VIC-20, or Atari 800/400 in your life.
Even Google contributes cash back to Mozilla in return for search advertisements because they know they are increasing their user base this way even after they developed their own open source browser. The least Apple could do is to have OSS specific programmers on their staff like Intel has. But of course Apple does not think in this way. They could care less. They no longer are a hardware company.
Apple are a bunch of shitheads because even if they release their source code back they produce crippled devices which are not meant to empower the user to use the hardware to its fullest extent but to line their pockets instead. Differences between iPod and iPhone? One antenna. Difference in price to the consumer? Over a hundred bucks. Price of an antenna? $1? $2? They have devices with multiple GB of storage which you cannot access as a regular storage device because of DRM and because it would obliterate their nice walled garden. You could actually install your own app in the device, heck even develop apps in the device, without going through the Apple anointed way. They are a bunch of control freaks even worse than Microsoft. They use open source software out of necessity for now, but it remains to be seen what will happen in the future. Apple is well known for shafting every other company they have dealt with including Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Motorola which weren't exactly coir boys to begin with either.
Nah, turning the other cheek is for chums. These people certainly do not think that way. It will be interesting to see how Apple is fairing one or two decades from now.
Oh dear. Users as a metric of profitability! I had not heard about that since the .com boom and bust.
You probably feel fine when you are in a ticket line and someone steps on your feet to get ahead in the queue while saying "sorry" but I certainly do not.