I disagree. Early adopters willing to spend their hard-earned money on this product should be smart enough to know that they're buying a bleeding-edge product.
Seriously. I'm not a huge fan of a cyborg future, but proclaiming the death of a future technology based on today's battery capacities is just silly. Once upon a time, most people only had 2400 baud access to the Internet; imagine if people had just looked at that and written off the possibility of high-bandwidth applications because they weren't feasible at the time. Just to name a couple, the Skypes and the Netflixes of the world exist because someone looked ahead and saw a time when bandwidth would be plentiful, and built technologies to allow its use.
If I were a Glass engineer, I would build everything assuming that one day there would be a way to hold a full day's charge at constant use within the frame. To assume otherwise is to artificially limit what will be possible when society is ready for mass adoption of this sort of technology.
Simply put, Amazon are the Wal-Mart of the Internet. Through economies of scale--as well as the fact that the management is heavily rewarded in the stock market for not making any profit--they are putting extreme pressure on small local businesses (as well as some other major players like Target, but I'm not shedding a tear for them), all the while subjecting their employees to slave-labor conditions.
They are like a weed, growing quickly and killing everything around them. I've got nothing against corporations that succeed, but I'd rather see Apple and Samsung battle it out and have one of them come on top (while we're all really rooting for HTC to make a scrappy come-back) than to watch Amazon killing the local bookstore, toy store, and other shops who simply can't compete. The long term effects of this sort of disruption are only now beginning to be felt, but it's going to get worse.
So in short, I despise Amazon because they are a massive juggernaut, destroying small economies and abusing their employees, and they do it by appealing to people's preference for short term benefits over long term investment. Me, I'd rather pay a couple of extra dollars and buy my kid's birthday present in a local shop from someone who will then spend the money locally than save a couple of bucks and basically water the weeds. What I fear is that there will one day come a time where the only place to buy a significant number of consumer items will be via Amazon.
I know that some degree of the same arguments could apply to a number of other large corporations, but for me, Amazon is one of the companies that is far enough over the line that, where possible, I try to avoid them completely.
This is what I was going to suggest. Doesn't Windows have the same thing? And Ubuntu? I can't imagine that it'd be patentable to build a gelded guest account...
Yeah. I understand Apple's policy, but the only people who really lose are the consumers. I remember after this went into effect, the first time I went into my Amazon Kindle iOS app and tried to buy there. No button, no link, no freaking hint of how to buy a book. How do you do it? You buy on the web, then tell Amazon to synch to your device which you've registered.
Works for Apple, I guess. I ended up just going to iBooks and buying there. I kind of despise Amazon anyway, but it would have been nice to have the choice while maintaining a similar end-user experience.
which is why you can still walk into some companies running old dos systems
DOS? My father used to build and deploy small nuclear reactors (cyclotrons) for use in medical/research facilities (specifically for creating radioactive tracers required for PET/CAT scans), and now acts as an independent consultant for the clients who've gotten those machines over the last 40 years or so.
He told me a few years back about going into a client facility with one of the older models, which had originally been run using a control system written on a PDP-11. At some point, the PDP-11 crapped out, and what the client did was get a beige box PC with appropriate ports added on in a slot, and with a PDP-11 emulator built in. They then hollowed out the rack cabinet where the PDP-11 had been housed and put the PC in it, along with some other equipment. With the cabinet door closed, it looked like it did the day it shipped.
I'd be a little worried about running a PDP-11 emulator on top of Windows 3.1 (IIRC, that was what the set-up was) for controlling a small nuclear device, but I guess it worked for them.
I understand the rationale behind the general rule as stated, but is it totally impossible that a strain of this could survive even an extreme change in environment, adapt and thrive to such a degree that it would become a danger to the natives of that environment?
I mean, I know it's more extreme than, say, eucalyptus trees in California or rabbits in Australia, but to write off the possibility completely seems like an exaggerated response.
I was going to be more glib in my response, but your sig implies that you've got some experience with the biological sciences, so my question is sincere.
I always thought it had something to do with the fact that Poland still had a horse-mounted cavalry at the beginning of WWII. Hitler famously staged a fake cavalry attack to justify invading Poland. I think that image of Polish cavalry charging across the border with their swords raised toward's Hitler's tanks has resonated through the ages.
Why did the NK submarine fleet sink? They left the screen doors open.
Why did the submarines have screen doors? To keep the fish out!
I'm sure that Poland is thrilled that NK has taken over their long worn mantle.
full disclosure: there is a lot of Polish peasantry among the branches of my family tree.
I guess the point of my point was not to out-and-out deny yours, but rather to suggest that it's rarely so black-and-white. My faster, lighter, sturdier bike response to your old bike that works fine was to hint at the possibility that with the new one, the point was not just bragging rights, but being able to get from point A to point B faster, in less of a sweat, and with less likelihood of requiring some sort of maintenance.
It's a matter of degrees. I absolutely agree that old things shouldn't be thrown out just because they're old, but with a 25-year-old piece of code, just like that bike, there are probably worthwhile reasons to consider changes, and if those changes are major enough, there are probably worthwhile reasons to consider changing the underlying technology.
Sometimes, inertia is a good enough reason not to change because the reasons to change are not compelling. Sometimes, inertia is a terrible reason not to change.
Maybe the new bike is lighter and faster, more comfortable, and has more reliable components. Perhaps it's even more sturdy so that I don't have to true my rims every time I hit a pot hole.
No software is perfect; there are always things that can improve. The GP poster doesn't say what the time frame was between coding and seeing it still there, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 20 year old code was still sitting there, and that any issues with the code were being dealt with via band-aid pre- and post-processing systems tacked on. Why would they tack things on like that? Because nobody wants to work on legacy code.
Documentation which assumes knowledge of information which is not well documented. Great for the folks who started with a technology on day one, but terrible for the newbie. Reminds me of RPM hell when I was a Linux admin. You need X to get Y. Now you need Q to get X. Now you need G to get Q. Anyway, a quick question to Stack Overflow often fills the gaps.
Beautiful, simple, clear examples which show how to implement something with steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 6. What the fuck is step 5? Stack Overflow knows.
Beautiful, simple, clear examples which show how to implement something in a deprecated environment. My most recent experience with this was implementing in-app purchases. Apple's own example would have worked great in pre-ARC days, but with ARC, the transaction queue was purged before the transaction in the queue had been fully cycled. The fix was simple, but with my relative lack of experience, finding the exact cause to determine that fix was frustrating. In this case, it was Apple's DEV forums, not SO, that came to the rescue.
I find that search tools built into many documentation systems either yield nothing or way too much information. It seems like years of research on finding relevant results by Internet search firms could be leveraged much better than they are.
That being said, the combination of sucky documentation and a great community of experienced, helpful people seems to work. It'd be great not to rely on the kindness of strangers, but, well, I'd like a pony, too. If there's a magic solution which reduces the prodigious amount of work required to address the issues I pointed out, then I welcome it. But I don't have such a solution handy; if I were a betting man, I'd suggest that the current hybrid solution will continue for some time to come.
Speaking from my perspective only, it's been quite a while since I felt that way about Windows, and it seems to me that the majority of comments about Microsoft being singled out unfairly have been from people claiming that Linux- or Mac-fanbois would be freaking out if the same exact thing had happened on a Windows box.
There was a time that a HUGE number of exploits existed against Windows itself (or IE, which is part of Windows), and an equal number of exploits existed against other major MS products such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. This was when everyone was wound up and ready to blame Microsoft for anything. In some cases, they were wrongly blamed for exploits against third-party products such as Firefox, and there were certainly times when the same people who decried MS for those third party exploits defended Apple or Linux in nearly identical circumstances, but really, overall, the Windows ecosystem *was* less secure back then. Now, things have mostly evened out, and it seems to me that 99% of the exploits these days go through Java, Flash or Acrobat.
One interesting thing that Apple has done is the whole shift towards the app store even for desktops, with the sandboxing requirement. Love it or hate it, if they've done it right, it will indeed make the system more secure. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft starts moving that direction as well.
How about this: you order a Big Mac, and when it's served, there are two bites taken out already. You ask why, and the manager indicates that the staff has to be fed.
...when I learned that my beloved Commodore 64 had only 38kb of usable RAM.
For the un-initiated, the issue was this: the OS (BASIC + kernel + font definitions) were stored in ROM, but on boot, were immediately copied to specific banks of RAM. If you were not going to use text, or if you were not going to use BASIC (or call any BASIC routines from an assembled/compiled program) you could use the RAM for other purposes, but you had to employ some tricks to do so.
Additionally, there were some registers that were dedicated for specific tasks. Things like screen memory and raster interrupts and other various things. They might technically be RAM, but if you tried to put code into them, you might throw your computer into an unacceptable state.
Ah, the good old days... I'm glad Microsoft has brought that all back.
I don't usually respond to ACs, but this post is either an attempted troll, or it's idiocy. With all the bullshit swirling around from the Fox-astroturfed Tea Party, I think it's important to call out stupidity when it presents itself.
The Confederacy was not a sovereign state. They had illegally seceded from the union in order to allow slavery to continue.
If you think what you said was funny, great: you're just an idiot. If, though, you really think that human slavery was an acceptable reason to secede from the union, you're a worthless sack of shit.
The operation, supported by the Shah, was successful, and Mosaddegh was arrested on 19 August 1953. The coup was the first time the US had openly overthrown an elected, civilian government of another sovereign state.
True dat. And sometimes building on their favorite flavor of Java. I can't tell you how often I've heard, "We can't install anything later than 1.4.2 because doing so will break X, Y, or Z application."
Totally not true. Enterprise IT people are still jumpy about Java and applets because of, well, the legacy of 1996. So it's not uncommon for individuals in such an enterprise--who've been beaten over the head about running applets or installing Java a million times--to get very concerned when you tell them that the web application that they're running relies on Javascript for many of its features. I know this for a fact; I've done consulting work for a significant number of large enterprise (5k-150k employees) in the context of web application performance, and *at least* once a week, we have someone raising concerns about installing Java--or at least a fear that they'll have to install a specific version of Java--when we discuss Javascript.
The one and only thing I like about C# is that nobody confuses it with Javascript. Of course, it's got its own namespace issues...
Part of a "market" in the context of capitalism is the money that flows from that market. So profit shares are indeed an important factor. This is all I'm saying. I'm not saying that MS won't continue to succeed, I'm not saying that Android is doomed. I'm not saying that Apple couldn't eventually fall to some yet-unknown black swan. However, the race to the bottom in terms of margins didn't play out well for several PC makers in the long run, so to suggest that entering a nascent market with razor thing margins in order to push units is a winning plan is, well, ignoring history.
And as to you other "points":
- Slave labor: Agreed, although it's not any different from that of their competitors, so to argue that this is a factor in their success is silly.
- Shiny: Sure. And many of their competitors sell shiny products as well. For the record, though, the newest iPhone has a matte finish for most of its surface.
- Overpriced: If it were overpriced, by definition, it wouldn't sell. Sure I'd like to have everything for free, but in a capitalist system, manufacturers get to charge what the market will bear.
- Garbage: You have every right to believe that hundreds of millions of users of iOS devices and Macs are stupid or delusional, but you just might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong. Apple's products may not fit your needs, or you may not like them for various objective and subjective reasons, but if they were truly garbage, the products would not continue to sell. Remember the Microsoft Kin Phone? That had some potential, and the idea was cool. But they were crap, and poorly timed at that, so the line failed and was cancelled within weeks of its debut. You just can't fool this many people for this many years. But I'm sure you know that.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. Early adopters willing to spend their hard-earned money on this product should be smart enough to know that they're buying a bleeding-edge product.
Seriously. I'm not a huge fan of a cyborg future, but proclaiming the death of a future technology based on today's battery capacities is just silly. Once upon a time, most people only had 2400 baud access to the Internet; imagine if people had just looked at that and written off the possibility of high-bandwidth applications because they weren't feasible at the time. Just to name a couple, the Skypes and the Netflixes of the world exist because someone looked ahead and saw a time when bandwidth would be plentiful, and built technologies to allow its use.
If I were a Glass engineer, I would build everything assuming that one day there would be a way to hold a full day's charge at constant use within the frame. To assume otherwise is to artificially limit what will be possible when society is ready for mass adoption of this sort of technology.
Simply put, Amazon are the Wal-Mart of the Internet. Through economies of scale--as well as the fact that the management is heavily rewarded in the stock market for not making any profit--they are putting extreme pressure on small local businesses (as well as some other major players like Target, but I'm not shedding a tear for them), all the while subjecting their employees to slave-labor conditions.
They are like a weed, growing quickly and killing everything around them. I've got nothing against corporations that succeed, but I'd rather see Apple and Samsung battle it out and have one of them come on top (while we're all really rooting for HTC to make a scrappy come-back) than to watch Amazon killing the local bookstore, toy store, and other shops who simply can't compete. The long term effects of this sort of disruption are only now beginning to be felt, but it's going to get worse.
So in short, I despise Amazon because they are a massive juggernaut, destroying small economies and abusing their employees, and they do it by appealing to people's preference for short term benefits over long term investment. Me, I'd rather pay a couple of extra dollars and buy my kid's birthday present in a local shop from someone who will then spend the money locally than save a couple of bucks and basically water the weeds. What I fear is that there will one day come a time where the only place to buy a significant number of consumer items will be via Amazon.
I know that some degree of the same arguments could apply to a number of other large corporations, but for me, Amazon is one of the companies that is far enough over the line that, where possible, I try to avoid them completely.
This is what I was going to suggest. Doesn't Windows have the same thing? And Ubuntu? I can't imagine that it'd be patentable to build a gelded guest account...
Yeah. I understand Apple's policy, but the only people who really lose are the consumers. I remember after this went into effect, the first time I went into my Amazon Kindle iOS app and tried to buy there. No button, no link, no freaking hint of how to buy a book. How do you do it? You buy on the web, then tell Amazon to synch to your device which you've registered.
Works for Apple, I guess. I ended up just going to iBooks and buying there. I kind of despise Amazon anyway, but it would have been nice to have the choice while maintaining a similar end-user experience.
which is why you can still walk into some companies running old dos systems
DOS? My father used to build and deploy small nuclear reactors (cyclotrons) for use in medical/research facilities (specifically for creating radioactive tracers required for PET/CAT scans), and now acts as an independent consultant for the clients who've gotten those machines over the last 40 years or so.
He told me a few years back about going into a client facility with one of the older models, which had originally been run using a control system written on a PDP-11. At some point, the PDP-11 crapped out, and what the client did was get a beige box PC with appropriate ports added on in a slot, and with a PDP-11 emulator built in. They then hollowed out the rack cabinet where the PDP-11 had been housed and put the PC in it, along with some other equipment. With the cabinet door closed, it looked like it did the day it shipped.
I'd be a little worried about running a PDP-11 emulator on top of Windows 3.1 (IIRC, that was what the set-up was) for controlling a small nuclear device, but I guess it worked for them.
In Soviet Russia, email old peoples you!
Duh. Google Wave!
I understand the rationale behind the general rule as stated, but is it totally impossible that a strain of this could survive even an extreme change in environment, adapt and thrive to such a degree that it would become a danger to the natives of that environment?
I mean, I know it's more extreme than, say, eucalyptus trees in California or rabbits in Australia, but to write off the possibility completely seems like an exaggerated response.
I was going to be more glib in my response, but your sig implies that you've got some experience with the biological sciences, so my question is sincere.
I always thought it had something to do with the fact that Poland still had a horse-mounted cavalry at the beginning of WWII. Hitler famously staged a fake cavalry attack to justify invading Poland. I think that image of Polish cavalry charging across the border with their swords raised toward's Hitler's tanks has resonated through the ages.
Why did the NK submarine fleet sink? They left the screen doors open.
Why did the submarines have screen doors? To keep the fish out!
I'm sure that Poland is thrilled that NK has taken over their long worn mantle.
full disclosure: there is a lot of Polish peasantry among the branches of my family tree.
I guess the point of my point was not to out-and-out deny yours, but rather to suggest that it's rarely so black-and-white. My faster, lighter, sturdier bike response to your old bike that works fine was to hint at the possibility that with the new one, the point was not just bragging rights, but being able to get from point A to point B faster, in less of a sweat, and with less likelihood of requiring some sort of maintenance.
It's a matter of degrees. I absolutely agree that old things shouldn't be thrown out just because they're old, but with a 25-year-old piece of code, just like that bike, there are probably worthwhile reasons to consider changes, and if those changes are major enough, there are probably worthwhile reasons to consider changing the underlying technology.
Sometimes, inertia is a good enough reason not to change because the reasons to change are not compelling. Sometimes, inertia is a terrible reason not to change.
Maybe the new bike is lighter and faster, more comfortable, and has more reliable components. Perhaps it's even more sturdy so that I don't have to true my rims every time I hit a pot hole.
No software is perfect; there are always things that can improve. The GP poster doesn't say what the time frame was between coding and seeing it still there, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 20 year old code was still sitting there, and that any issues with the code were being dealt with via band-aid pre- and post-processing systems tacked on. Why would they tack things on like that? Because nobody wants to work on legacy code.
That being said, the combination of sucky documentation and a great community of experienced, helpful people seems to work. It'd be great not to rely on the kindness of strangers, but, well, I'd like a pony, too. If there's a magic solution which reduces the prodigious amount of work required to address the issues I pointed out, then I welcome it. But I don't have such a solution handy; if I were a betting man, I'd suggest that the current hybrid solution will continue for some time to come.
Speaking from my perspective only, it's been quite a while since I felt that way about Windows, and it seems to me that the majority of comments about Microsoft being singled out unfairly have been from people claiming that Linux- or Mac-fanbois would be freaking out if the same exact thing had happened on a Windows box.
There was a time that a HUGE number of exploits existed against Windows itself (or IE, which is part of Windows), and an equal number of exploits existed against other major MS products such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. This was when everyone was wound up and ready to blame Microsoft for anything. In some cases, they were wrongly blamed for exploits against third-party products such as Firefox, and there were certainly times when the same people who decried MS for those third party exploits defended Apple or Linux in nearly identical circumstances, but really, overall, the Windows ecosystem *was* less secure back then. Now, things have mostly evened out, and it seems to me that 99% of the exploits these days go through Java, Flash or Acrobat.
One interesting thing that Apple has done is the whole shift towards the app store even for desktops, with the sandboxing requirement. Love it or hate it, if they've done it right, it will indeed make the system more secure. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft starts moving that direction as well.
And rounded corners.
How about this: you order a Big Mac, and when it's served, there are two bites taken out already. You ask why, and the manager indicates that the staff has to be fed.
...when I learned that my beloved Commodore 64 had only 38kb of usable RAM.
For the un-initiated, the issue was this: the OS (BASIC + kernel + font definitions) were stored in ROM, but on boot, were immediately copied to specific banks of RAM. If you were not going to use text, or if you were not going to use BASIC (or call any BASIC routines from an assembled/compiled program) you could use the RAM for other purposes, but you had to employ some tricks to do so.
Additionally, there were some registers that were dedicated for specific tasks. Things like screen memory and raster interrupts and other various things. They might technically be RAM, but if you tried to put code into them, you might throw your computer into an unacceptable state.
Ah, the good old days... I'm glad Microsoft has brought that all back.
I don't usually respond to ACs, but this post is either an attempted troll, or it's idiocy. With all the bullshit swirling around from the Fox-astroturfed Tea Party, I think it's important to call out stupidity when it presents itself.
The Confederacy was not a sovereign state. They had illegally seceded from the union in order to allow slavery to continue.
If you think what you said was funny, great: you're just an idiot. If, though, you really think that human slavery was an acceptable reason to secede from the union, you're a worthless sack of shit.
The operation, supported by the Shah, was successful, and Mosaddegh was arrested on 19 August 1953. The coup was the first time the US had openly overthrown an elected, civilian government of another sovereign state.
pinch to bada bing, bada boom!
(or not; it's the best joke on the topic I could think of)
True dat. And sometimes building on their favorite flavor of Java. I can't tell you how often I've heard, "We can't install anything later than 1.4.2 because doing so will break X, Y, or Z application."
Totally not true. Enterprise IT people are still jumpy about Java and applets because of, well, the legacy of 1996. So it's not uncommon for individuals in such an enterprise--who've been beaten over the head about running applets or installing Java a million times--to get very concerned when you tell them that the web application that they're running relies on Javascript for many of its features. I know this for a fact; I've done consulting work for a significant number of large enterprise (5k-150k employees) in the context of web application performance, and *at least* once a week, we have someone raising concerns about installing Java--or at least a fear that they'll have to install a specific version of Java--when we discuss Javascript.
The one and only thing I like about C# is that nobody confuses it with Javascript. Of course, it's got its own namespace issues...
I'm sure that this won't make lay-person misunderstandings of the difference between Java and Javascript worse at all! At all! AT ALL!
Part of a "market" in the context of capitalism is the money that flows from that market. So profit shares are indeed an important factor. This is all I'm saying. I'm not saying that MS won't continue to succeed, I'm not saying that Android is doomed. I'm not saying that Apple couldn't eventually fall to some yet-unknown black swan. However, the race to the bottom in terms of margins didn't play out well for several PC makers in the long run, so to suggest that entering a nascent market with razor thing margins in order to push units is a winning plan is, well, ignoring history.
And as to you other "points":
- Slave labor: Agreed, although it's not any different from that of their competitors, so to argue that this is a factor in their success is silly.
- Shiny: Sure. And many of their competitors sell shiny products as well. For the record, though, the newest iPhone has a matte finish for most of its surface.
- Overpriced: If it were overpriced, by definition, it wouldn't sell. Sure I'd like to have everything for free, but in a capitalist system, manufacturers get to charge what the market will bear.
- Garbage: You have every right to believe that hundreds of millions of users of iOS devices and Macs are stupid or delusional, but you just might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong. Apple's products may not fit your needs, or you may not like them for various objective and subjective reasons, but if they were truly garbage, the products would not continue to sell. Remember the Microsoft Kin Phone? That had some potential, and the idea was cool. But they were crap, and poorly timed at that, so the line failed and was cancelled within weeks of its debut. You just can't fool this many people for this many years. But I'm sure you know that.