I think as in most situation, it's the vocal minority that garners the most attention. Furthermore, the press in general prefer sensationalistic headlines/stories, as they sell better.
I think it's important to keep in mind that "geeks" as a population are composed of people of different motivations and agendas. So some would like to stymie technical growth or turn "evil", while others are happy to find out how things work. Furthermore, I think some people realized that by focusing on negative aspects of new technology, they get more press coverage (see the first part of this post), so they try and exploit it.
Salary ranges varies greatly depending on the location of your search. Here in Southern California, entry positions seems to start around $45K. This is for web application development - the field I am most familiar with. It's probably different for other kinds of development jobs. Salaries have gone down quite a bit in the past two years.
For all those wondering about the selections of players for this review, it looks like this article is a review of ultra portable players. The kinds that are used for going to the gym or jogging, hence the title "Play As You Go". That's why there are a large number of flash players and such. The original iPod and its competitors are not really within this category, they are still too bulky for most people to workout with.
Until you got to the part about code monkeys. What makes you think that American workers are smarter than Indian workers? I've met plenty of Indians that are very smart and better educated than I am.
I think there are skilled and less skilled programmers no matter what country you are looking at. Keep in mind, the outsourcing boom for India has created a bubble of sort. Remember the late 90's in the US with the dot com bubble? Suddenly all sorts of people are becoming web application developers, even though it usually means they sit through some quickie training course on how to use Dreamweaver and such. The same thing is happening in India. There have been plenty of articles about people in India paying for quickie technical training so they can get these tech jobs, but that also means the quality of work goes down in the process.
I went to Australia for my Master's degree in IT, and incidentally, a huge percentage of Indians go to Australia for their education. I can tell you that I've met some really talented and skilled Indian programmers, but I've also met a lot of people who were there just for the diploma and had no interest in what they were learning - so many of them were just squeezing by. Some of the students' works I've seen were simply atrocious. Which was shocking because although some of the courses were challenging, I really thought none were hard enough for people to fail (and a lot did). But this has nothing to do with nationality, it's just because they are in it for the quick buck. It's the late 90's all over again, but it's just not taking place in the US.
I hear you. I went to RMIT for my Master's in IT, and I think it's a little bit better than Macquarie in terms of alternative OS support, but not much. When I was there, only about 5 student in the whole department were running OS X (me included), and I am sure no more than 5 were running Linux. Getting any sort of support was basically nil. However, I was very happy to see the advanced graphics lab running Linux, and our main servers were all Solaris based (except for some Windows Terminal Server monstrosities).
The good thing was that none of the courses were too Microsoft centric. In fact I was able to complete all of my assignments and subjects using OS X! Thank goodness for its UNIX underpinnings.
However, being a Java webapp developer with no MS training, looking for a job in Oz was always fun ("Do you know ASP? Oh, too bad, it's an ASP position." "Did you even bother to read my CV?"):-P
Mark Pilgrim's complaint regarding Mozilla's "type ahead" feature not working with Gmail seem to have been addresses according to this blog:
http://jogin.com/weblog/archives/2004/04/15/juic e
It looks like Gmail is evolving at a rapid pace, so most of the bugs will probably be worked out by the time it launches. My concern though is that if seems to be using a lot of frames and client side caching, so it's probably quite slow on dial-up connections.
Actually, this is pretty important. Governmental departments are notoriously slow to change. This shows that governments are slowing giving MS/Windows alternatives a chance, which is extremely positive. Sure, they may not have gone with Linux (the fact that Mac OS X runs MS Office natively probably makes it easy for them to transition to the new platform), but this shows that alternative OS's are slowly gaining traction. Furthermore, Australia is very Microsoft-centric. I was surprised by the prevalence of MS technology there. And the fact that an Aussie governmental department would go with Apple highlights that alternative OS's may have a chance after all.
I think part of Apple's reluctance to team up with Real is because Apple want to make QuickTime ubiquitous. The latest stats I can find about media players place QT at the number 3 slot (WMP is #1 and Real is #2). Keeping in mind that Apple is trying to fortify itself as THE media creation company. For Apple to have more clout in the creative industry, especially in motion pictures and music, it needs to make sure its formats (even though they are all pretty much based on open standards) are the standards. And the only way to really do that is to have QT become much more popular than it is today.
Think about it. How does iTunes work? By using QuickTime. QT has had very bad rep in the PC world (flaky player, etc.), and many Windows users don't install it before. But now, with the iPod and iTunes Music Store, people are starting to install QuickTime again. iTMS won't work without it! Now if Real comes in and offers the same service but bypassing QT, people would no longer be installing QuickTime.
On an interesting note, it is not clear from their TOS whether or not you still have to pay for a song recognition even if the service is unable to accurately provide you with the song title.
From the article:
AT&T will let you test the service for free your first call, but everytime after that it costs $.99 cents, plus standard airtime charges. If it can't guess the song, then your next call is free.
Not fan of the "next call is free" policy. I'd rather have the current call to be free. Who knows when will I try to use it again.
Real states that for allowing them to license FairPlay, they'll make iPod their player of choice. But, if they start selling FairPlay DRM'ed AAC files, how can they not? This doesn't seem like that much of an incentive to me. After all, iPod is the ONLY player on the market that works with FairPlay DRM.
I am now wondering if Real wants Apple to do more than just licensing FairPlay to them, i.e. allowing them to sub-licensing it to 3rd party hardware vendors so that other players on the market can also play their files. If that's the case, there is no way in hell Apple would do so, since that would cut into their iPod sales.
According to the article, "Fly or Die" costs $16.99 on iTunes, but iTunes is in fact selling it at $13.99. Maybe iTunes was charging $16.99 before.
This may be higher than what some retailers are charging for the CD, but you can still buy the songs individually for $0.99 on iTunes. Only two songs are bundled with the album, but they are both over 7 minutes long, which if I remember correctly, is the threshold iTunes imposes for songs purchasable only as part of an album.
If you are worried about email privacy, why not encrypt all your emails using GPG or PGP? That way you should be able to use any ISP for your email needs without worrying about someone snooping your email.
...if something does happen, Apple will probably be the last to really care. You can see these attitudes reflected in the problems the iBook and iPod has had regarding their hardware.
Considering the number of iPods shipped since its inception and the number of people who actually complain about battery issues, it is a very small percentage of iPods that are affected. Furthermore, it's also debatable if the battery problems are indeed problems or just normal wear and tear. I have a first generation iPod and despite its age, its battery still works fine (I use it daily). In fact, I probably put more wear and tear on my iPod than average users since I've travelled with it around the globe.
I am not saying the iPod issues raised by some users are non-existent, but simply that it's a small percentage of users. Furthermore, Apple offers a one year warranty on iPods and extended AppleCare for it too. There are also 3rd party iPod battery vendors. So in terms of support, there are plenty of options.
Regarding the iBook, Apple has implemented a logic board repair extension program (http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/), so I don't quite understand what "attitude" Apple has that's deplorable in this circumstance.
Well, for the GCN it's probably because they went with a optical disk format and not cartridges. The cost of adding a cartridge slot just for backwards compatibility may have been prohibitive.
For the older generations of Nintendo consoles... I am not sure. Partially it's probably because Nintendo seems to be much more willing to exploit different platforms (i.e. GPU's, CPU's, etc.) to suit its current generation console needs, and may make backwards compatibility too expensive. However, I think partially it's also because Nintendo seemed to have longer time periods b/w console updates than its competition, so by the time the current console is released, the previous console is probably cheap enough to buy as a separate unit.
I have to admit I was pretty bummed when I got my SNES and realized that they were not going to release some sort of adaptor for my NES cartridges - especially since SEGA did on the Genesis.
The iPod's OS is not fully developed in house. If I remember correctly, the iPod is essentially built from off the shelf software and hardware. So even if Apple would want to do such a thing (I can't imagine they would since it's a cash cow for them right now), I doubt they could.
However, I do think it would be Apple's best interest to release some API's for the iPod so users can develop some apps for it.
Not all games are made for the PC and console market. Smart phones and PDA's will likely become pervasive, and J2ME makes an excellent platform for developing games on those devices.
I agree that ultimately it'll probably make it a better language, but it will take plenty of time for the benefits to realize themselves, and in the mean time, as the language get stagnant, it'll probably be eclipsed by C#. Look at Netscape/Mozilla for example. Open sourcing Navigator ultimately led to a better browser, but how long did it take before a version 1.0 of Mozilla was finally released? During that time, while Navigator was stuck in 4.x limbo, IE overtook it easily. Furthermore, despite Mozilla being open sourced, its evolution is guided closely by Mozilla.org. Java have a similar guiding entity, it's called JCP (Java Community Process). A board anyone can join and contribute to. Besides, Java's API's are clearly documented, and other companies can make a compatible JVM (IBM, Apple, and BEA all did). And the sources for the classes included with the JDK's are freely available.
Look at perl for example... But no, it's on the standard distribution of just about any UNIX-like OS out there, and many websites use mod perl with Apache to get some great results (including/.)...
This logic doesn't explain the tremendous growth Java has enjoyed on the server side. J2EE technologies are implemented widely on the Internet, and there are plenty of web applications (and tools) build using Java (Tomcat, Ant, etc.).
But isn't Java already "half-ass" open sourced? I mean, the sources of the classes included with the JDK is freely available, and the API's are clearly documented, and Sun seems to be happy for other vendors to implement their own JVM's. IBM, Apple, and BEA all have their own JVM's.
I am somewhat confused by cries for Java to be open sourced. Java's evolution is not guided by just Sun alone. The language's growth is guided by the Java Community Process, which consists of Java developers and licensees - in other words, people who use the language and have a stake in its evolution. It seems like anyone can participate.
Also, I don't think Sun actually distribute Java for profit, as far as I know, anyone can download the JDK's and accompany documentations.
This is a shootout targeting home users. So speed is important. Most home users do not have multiple machines, so while the video is being encoded, it's unlikely that they can use the machine for much else. In this case, the faster the video is encoded, the faster the home user can get their machine back.
Actually, according to the pages you posted, only about 5% of Yahoo! users go to http://search.yahoo.com.
Also, according to Alexa's ranking of top 100 sites, Google actually have 4 seperate entries because of its local versions. Specifically, Google (main), Google UK, Google Canada, and Google Australia. I don't know how much Google's ranking can be boosted if its parts are summed together.
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=l an g&lang=en
I think the sad fact is that people who move into these industries forget that these industries' initial successes are due to risk-taking, since these are essentially "creative" industries (maybe I am stretching a bit here in regards to IT, but I think creativity is still vital to IT). So when creativity is taken out of the equation, the industry gets into trouble.
This was clearly shown in the 60's and 70's when Hollywood was in severe financial trouble (after the Hollywood "Golden Age"), and what saved the industry was an injection of brand new talents (with regards to cinematography, directing, writing, and technology).
AFAIK, many artists do their modeling using Maya then offloading the rendering to the server, and since Maya is available on the Mac also, it should be possible to do the whole production on a Mac as it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I think as in most situation, it's the vocal minority that garners the most attention. Furthermore, the press in general prefer sensationalistic headlines/stories, as they sell better.
I think it's important to keep in mind that "geeks" as a population are composed of people of different motivations and agendas. So some would like to stymie technical growth or turn "evil", while others are happy to find out how things work. Furthermore, I think some people realized that by focusing on negative aspects of new technology, they get more press coverage (see the first part of this post), so they try and exploit it.
-B
It's a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill or George Bernard Shaw. Other variants include:
"If a man is not a liberal when he is 18, he has no heart. If a man is not a conservative when he is 30, he has no brain."
And...
"If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If a man is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain."
But neither Churchill nor Shaw ever uttered those quotes according to this page...
http://www.ranea.org/watts/archives/000081.html
-B
Salary ranges varies greatly depending on the location of your search. Here in Southern California, entry positions seems to start around $45K. This is for web application development - the field I am most familiar with. It's probably different for other kinds of development jobs. Salaries have gone down quite a bit in the past two years.
Congratulations on graduating, and good luck!
-B
For all those wondering about the selections of players for this review, it looks like this article is a review of ultra portable players. The kinds that are used for going to the gym or jogging, hence the title "Play As You Go". That's why there are a large number of flash players and such. The original iPod and its competitors are not really within this category, they are still too bulky for most people to workout with.
-B
Until you got to the part about code monkeys. What makes you think that American workers are smarter than Indian workers? I've met plenty of Indians that are very smart and better educated than I am.
I think there are skilled and less skilled programmers no matter what country you are looking at. Keep in mind, the outsourcing boom for India has created a bubble of sort. Remember the late 90's in the US with the dot com bubble? Suddenly all sorts of people are becoming web application developers, even though it usually means they sit through some quickie training course on how to use Dreamweaver and such. The same thing is happening in India. There have been plenty of articles about people in India paying for quickie technical training so they can get these tech jobs, but that also means the quality of work goes down in the process.
I went to Australia for my Master's degree in IT, and incidentally, a huge percentage of Indians go to Australia for their education. I can tell you that I've met some really talented and skilled Indian programmers, but I've also met a lot of people who were there just for the diploma and had no interest in what they were learning - so many of them were just squeezing by. Some of the students' works I've seen were simply atrocious. Which was shocking because although some of the courses were challenging, I really thought none were hard enough for people to fail (and a lot did). But this has nothing to do with nationality, it's just because they are in it for the quick buck. It's the late 90's all over again, but it's just not taking place in the US.
-B
I hear you. I went to RMIT for my Master's in IT, and I think it's a little bit better than Macquarie in terms of alternative OS support, but not much. When I was there, only about 5 student in the whole department were running OS X (me included), and I am sure no more than 5 were running Linux. Getting any sort of support was basically nil. However, I was very happy to see the advanced graphics lab running Linux, and our main servers were all Solaris based (except for some Windows Terminal Server monstrosities).
:-P
The good thing was that none of the courses were too Microsoft centric. In fact I was able to complete all of my assignments and subjects using OS X! Thank goodness for its UNIX underpinnings.
However, being a Java webapp developer with no MS training, looking for a job in Oz was always fun ("Do you know ASP? Oh, too bad, it's an ASP position." "Did you even bother to read my CV?")
-B
Mark Pilgrim's complaint regarding Mozilla's "type ahead" feature not working with Gmail seem to have been addresses according to this blog:
c e
http://jogin.com/weblog/archives/2004/04/15/jui
It looks like Gmail is evolving at a rapid pace, so most of the bugs will probably be worked out by the time it launches. My concern though is that if seems to be using a lot of frames and client side caching, so it's probably quite slow on dial-up connections.
-B
Actually, this is pretty important. Governmental departments are notoriously slow to change. This shows that governments are slowing giving MS/Windows alternatives a chance, which is extremely positive. Sure, they may not have gone with Linux (the fact that Mac OS X runs MS Office natively probably makes it easy for them to transition to the new platform), but this shows that alternative OS's are slowly gaining traction. Furthermore, Australia is very Microsoft-centric. I was surprised by the prevalence of MS technology there. And the fact that an Aussie governmental department would go with Apple highlights that alternative OS's may have a chance after all.
-B
I think part of Apple's reluctance to team up with Real is because Apple want to make QuickTime ubiquitous. The latest stats I can find about media players place QT at the number 3 slot (WMP is #1 and Real is #2). Keeping in mind that Apple is trying to fortify itself as THE media creation company. For Apple to have more clout in the creative industry, especially in motion pictures and music, it needs to make sure its formats (even though they are all pretty much based on open standards) are the standards. And the only way to really do that is to have QT become much more popular than it is today.
Think about it. How does iTunes work? By using QuickTime. QT has had very bad rep in the PC world (flaky player, etc.), and many Windows users don't install it before. But now, with the iPod and iTunes Music Store, people are starting to install QuickTime again. iTMS won't work without it! Now if Real comes in and offers the same service but bypassing QT, people would no longer be installing QuickTime.
-B
On an interesting note, it is not clear from their TOS whether or not you still have to pay for a song recognition even if the service is unable to accurately provide you with the song title.
From the article:
AT&T will let you test the service for free your first call, but everytime after that it costs $.99 cents, plus standard airtime charges. If it can't guess the song, then your next call is free.
Not fan of the "next call is free" policy. I'd rather have the current call to be free. Who knows when will I try to use it again.
-B
Real states that for allowing them to license FairPlay, they'll make iPod their player of choice. But, if they start selling FairPlay DRM'ed AAC files, how can they not? This doesn't seem like that much of an incentive to me. After all, iPod is the ONLY player on the market that works with FairPlay DRM.
I am now wondering if Real wants Apple to do more than just licensing FairPlay to them, i.e. allowing them to sub-licensing it to 3rd party hardware vendors so that other players on the market can also play their files. If that's the case, there is no way in hell Apple would do so, since that would cut into their iPod sales.
-B
Here are some resources on developing J2ME applications on Mac OS X, hope they are useful.
i dp /articles/osx/
http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/m
http://mpowers.net/midp-osx/
-B
According to the article, "Fly or Die" costs $16.99 on iTunes, but iTunes is in fact selling it at $13.99. Maybe iTunes was charging $16.99 before.
This may be higher than what some retailers are charging for the CD, but you can still buy the songs individually for $0.99 on iTunes. Only two songs are bundled with the album, but they are both over 7 minutes long, which if I remember correctly, is the threshold iTunes imposes for songs purchasable only as part of an album.
-B
If you are worried about email privacy, why not encrypt all your emails using GPG or PGP? That way you should be able to use any ISP for your email needs without worrying about someone snooping your email.
-B
...if something does happen, Apple will probably be the last to really care. You can see these attitudes reflected in the problems the iBook and iPod has had regarding their hardware.
Considering the number of iPods shipped since its inception and the number of people who actually complain about battery issues, it is a very small percentage of iPods that are affected. Furthermore, it's also debatable if the battery problems are indeed problems or just normal wear and tear. I have a first generation iPod and despite its age, its battery still works fine (I use it daily). In fact, I probably put more wear and tear on my iPod than average users since I've travelled with it around the globe.
I am not saying the iPod issues raised by some users are non-existent, but simply that it's a small percentage of users. Furthermore, Apple offers a one year warranty on iPods and extended AppleCare for it too. There are also 3rd party iPod battery vendors. So in terms of support, there are plenty of options.
Regarding the iBook, Apple has implemented a logic board repair extension program (http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/), so I don't quite understand what "attitude" Apple has that's deplorable in this circumstance.
-B
Well, for the GCN it's probably because they went with a optical disk format and not cartridges. The cost of adding a cartridge slot just for backwards compatibility may have been prohibitive.
For the older generations of Nintendo consoles... I am not sure. Partially it's probably because Nintendo seems to be much more willing to exploit different platforms (i.e. GPU's, CPU's, etc.) to suit its current generation console needs, and may make backwards compatibility too expensive. However, I think partially it's also because Nintendo seemed to have longer time periods b/w console updates than its competition, so by the time the current console is released, the previous console is probably cheap enough to buy as a separate unit.
I have to admit I was pretty bummed when I got my SNES and realized that they were not going to release some sort of adaptor for my NES cartridges - especially since SEGA did on the Genesis.
-B
The iPod's OS is not fully developed in house. If I remember correctly, the iPod is essentially built from off the shelf software and hardware. So even if Apple would want to do such a thing (I can't imagine they would since it's a cash cow for them right now), I doubt they could.
However, I do think it would be Apple's best interest to release some API's for the iPod so users can develop some apps for it.
-B
Not all games are made for the PC and console market. Smart phones and PDA's will likely become pervasive, and J2ME makes an excellent platform for developing games on those devices.
-B
Open sourcing Java is not a panacea.
/.)...
I agree that ultimately it'll probably make it a better language, but it will take plenty of time for the benefits to realize themselves, and in the mean time, as the language get stagnant, it'll probably be eclipsed by C#. Look at Netscape/Mozilla for example. Open sourcing Navigator ultimately led to a better browser, but how long did it take before a version 1.0 of Mozilla was finally released? During that time, while Navigator was stuck in 4.x limbo, IE overtook it easily. Furthermore, despite Mozilla being open sourced, its evolution is guided closely by Mozilla.org. Java have a similar guiding entity, it's called JCP (Java Community Process). A board anyone can join and contribute to. Besides, Java's API's are clearly documented, and other companies can make a compatible JVM (IBM, Apple, and BEA all did). And the sources for the classes included with the JDK's are freely available.
Look at perl for example... But no, it's on the standard distribution of just about any UNIX-like OS out there, and many websites use mod perl with Apache to get some great results (including
This logic doesn't explain the tremendous growth Java has enjoyed on the server side. J2EE technologies are implemented widely on the Internet, and there are plenty of web applications (and tools) build using Java (Tomcat, Ant, etc.).
-B
But isn't Java already "half-ass" open sourced? I mean, the sources of the classes included with the JDK is freely available, and the API's are clearly documented, and Sun seems to be happy for other vendors to implement their own JVM's. IBM, Apple, and BEA all have their own JVM's.
I am somewhat confused by cries for Java to be open sourced. Java's evolution is not guided by just Sun alone. The language's growth is guided by the Java Community Process, which consists of Java developers and licensees - in other words, people who use the language and have a stake in its evolution. It seems like anyone can participate.
Also, I don't think Sun actually distribute Java for profit, as far as I know, anyone can download the JDK's and accompany documentations.
-B
This is a shootout targeting home users. So speed is important. Most home users do not have multiple machines, so while the video is being encoded, it's unlikely that they can use the machine for much else. In this case, the faster the video is encoded, the faster the home user can get their machine back.
-B
Hmm... But what if you have to pay $9.95 a month (on top of your ISP charges) for said encyclopedia?
-B
Actually, according to the pages you posted, only about 5% of Yahoo! users go to http://search.yahoo.com .
l an g&lang=en
Also, according to Alexa's ranking of top 100 sites, Google actually have 4 seperate entries because of its local versions. Specifically, Google (main), Google UK, Google Canada, and Google Australia. I don't know how much Google's ranking can be boosted if its parts are summed together.
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=
-B
I think the sad fact is that people who move into these industries forget that these industries' initial successes are due to risk-taking, since these are essentially "creative" industries (maybe I am stretching a bit here in regards to IT, but I think creativity is still vital to IT). So when creativity is taken out of the equation, the industry gets into trouble.
This was clearly shown in the 60's and 70's when Hollywood was in severe financial trouble (after the Hollywood "Golden Age"), and what saved the industry was an injection of brand new talents (with regards to cinematography, directing, writing, and technology).
-B
Well, the RenderMan Pro Server version 11.5 is already supported on the Mac.
i nd ex.htm
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/techspecs/
AFAIK, many artists do their modeling using Maya then offloading the rendering to the server, and since Maya is available on the Mac also, it should be possible to do the whole production on a Mac as it is.
-B