The app "gold rush" encourages people to out in untold millions of man-hours of development time to get a piece of the multi-billion action. What it doesn't say is that a huge chunk of that goes to some random guy who just got lucky (think Flappy Bird) and someone who just took a very common game idea and stuck cutesy graphics on it (Angry Birds). It also doesn't take into account that if you come up with a good idea for a game, you're likely to get cloned almost immediately, and quite possibly by Zynga, who will use their marketing muscle to push you out.
A lot of app developers end up never even making back their Developer Programme membership fees.
But Apple doesn't care, because their customers have a limited amount of spending money, and they're probably spending it all as it is. Given that Apple's cut is a fixed percentage, there's no financial motive for Apple to change the model. And developers are instant profit for Apple, even if they never sell a single app.
My sister used to run out into the garden to pick fresh broccoli to eat when she was a child. As an adult, she has been seen walking down the street munching on a head of raw broccoli.
Let's get TV out of the way - it's passive, dumbed-down, lowest common denominator entertainment.
Twilight, Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades of Grey...? The medium is NOT the message. Reading is not automatically less trashy than watching TV, or vice versa.
A trap? Not really. From the developer's point of view, they'll still be able to get access to any changes to code on their terms, even if it is "tivoised". They can incorporate them into their code base without worrying too much about which hardware devices will or won't work - Somebody Else's Problem. They're interested in the code, not in "right to do whatever you want with your devices."
Surely a formally-proven OS doesn't want a traditional open-source license, because if you let people tinker, what you will end up with is forking... into unproven versions. And suddenly, the world's first formally-proven microkernel is just a plain old microkernel again.
OK, so maybe tinkering is alright as a personal hobby, but it risks the ecosystem.
The big manufacturers are all too busy competing with Apple to actually notice there might be a market for something else..
Quite. I never understood why Google didn't try to get a jump on Apple by speccing up an OS version for phones with D-pads for gamers at first launch. Look at the mess and fragmentation that we ended up with in third-party accessory controllers for the first few generations, and there are still some compatibility kinks to trip you up...
I thought OLED's biggest problem was UV stimulating chemical decomposition. If so, surely the laws of physics say an OLED display in a black box with two small eyeholes is going to last much longer than a mobile phone display that is often used in direct sunlight...?
"Except" nothing. We always knew there were spies. the point is that having a particular political or social view does not make you automatically a spy, or an enemy of the state.
Capitalism is about ownership of the means of production. Property rights exist even in feudal societies - even if everything can be confiscated by your divine ruler, until it is, it's yours.
capitalism != democracy. The two often appear together (see "bourgeois-democratic revolution") but either can exist in the absence of the other. This may seem a trivial point, particularly when you were just trying to make a joke, but it's a serious issue that most people don't thing enough about - they bundle a large number of ideological and practical philosophies together and claim they're one thing.
The classic example would be religion and morality. The unthinking religious person sees morality as being an inseparable component of his religion, with the consequence that anyone not of his religion must be immoral, or at the very least amoral. This leads to interreligion conflicts, and atheist vs religious conflicts, and everyone ends up worse off.
Socialism is governance for the good of society. Communism is governance for the good of the commune. These are established definitions. You can decide to let people who abuse the terms redefine them to their own ends, but in doing so, you grant them the power they seek. There are many in the world today who claim their atrocities are right, and done in the name of their god - and this includes right-wing Christians and Jews, not only radical Muslims. Should we allow them to do this, or should we point out that that they are breaking the fundamental tenets of Abrahamic law? If we attack all Muslims for the actions of fundamentalist crackpots, we alienate moderate Muslims. If we attack anyone who believes in the concept of a welfare state as being supports of Stalinist gulags, we alienate them.
Ludditism and Communist thought often co-occur, but the majority of serious Communists saw automation as a way to free the proletariat. The goal was to use automation to spread the wealth and reduce working hours, rather than using it as a way to reduce employment and further concentrate wealth in the hands of the few.
Adam Smith is generally credited with being the founder of capitalism, with his book The Wealth of Nations. However, the book reads more easily as a communist tract, as he proposes the collectivisation of labour -- workers' coops, essentially -- and industrialisation as a means to increase efficiency and therefore individual wealth. Smith's argument that a conscientious pinmaker could make enough pins and save enough money to automate failed to consider the effects of automation elsewhere, which meant that the unautomated pinmaker was likely to be forced out of business by falling prices.
He glossed right over the rise of the industrialist capitalist - the man who had enough money to set up a factory, therefore making enough money to set up another, and so on ad infinitum. It continues to this day that those who start with money can squeeze the new players out.
Remember also that the industrialists had people working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. They invented he night shift for their own profit, not for the quality of the product, nor in order to provide employment. In the industrial revolution, workers were less valuable than manure.
So it's not surprising that many people associated automation with slavery, but it's a shame. As I said, communist thought says automation should serve the commune (NB: not "the state") and free everyone to have more leisure time.
But leisure time is dangerous in a totalitarian regime, so the nominally-communist dictator will play up the "machinery is capitalism" myth in order to aid him in maintaining control.
Of course. A corporation is a legal "person" in the US, and they're persons with much greater expenses than (for example) a disabled single mother, so of course they need more welfare. Only a commie would suggest otherwise!
I think his point is that e theoretical free-market that serves the consumer's every need is a myth, and that companies diddle the books to look good rather than making a decent product. I can empathise with this view.
Man, I haven't even mentioned the numerical computing....
As an exception, it is simply obscures the subject of the discussion.
I didn't mention it either. I'm talking about data transforms in general, and the fact that most people can't see the wide applicability of computational transforms to data manipulation tasks that are not strictly numeric is precisely the problem I'm referring to. I'm currently applying the concepts of transformations to manipulating abstract data types and tree structures, because my first attempt at doing it algorithmically resulted in a codebase that was growing exponentially in size with every new case included.
In abstracting all my data manipulations as computational transformations, I can combine them in arbitrary ways, just as can be done with matrix transforms, thus eliminating the need to write explicit code for every individual case.
I did Computer Science at Edinburgh University as my first degree, and it was very academic and non-vocational. Employers often criticised our syllabus as being irrelevant, but if I'd spent my university years learning Java, I wouldn't be doing what I am today. (Private enterprise development work on a hopefully-revolutionary natural language processing application.) University should teach you as much as possible to open your potential. The US system may be broken, but that is not a direct consequence of having an academic focus, more on politics and economics.
The big thing holding back computing is that computer programmers tend to think only in terms of algorithmics, and not in terms of (mathematical) computation. Computation in mathematics allows all sorts of funky stuff, and the only area where it is commonly applied is in vector manipulation. Applying matrices to matrices to matrices allows us to create infinite combinations of reusable transforms, which can then be applied to all the vertices in a 3D model at a low cost. Applying a series of algorithmic procedures to manipulate the same data would be unworkably slow. Algothmic programming results in lots of unintended interactions, and hard-to-track phantom bugs in the code. Computation is harder to start with, but it scales so much better and results in much more stable projects.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is a bit more subtle than that.
The app "gold rush" encourages people to out in untold millions of man-hours of development time to get a piece of the multi-billion action. What it doesn't say is that a huge chunk of that goes to some random guy who just got lucky (think Flappy Bird) and someone who just took a very common game idea and stuck cutesy graphics on it (Angry Birds). It also doesn't take into account that if you come up with a good idea for a game, you're likely to get cloned almost immediately, and quite possibly by Zynga, who will use their marketing muscle to push you out.
A lot of app developers end up never even making back their Developer Programme membership fees.
But Apple doesn't care, because their customers have a limited amount of spending money, and they're probably spending it all as it is. Given that Apple's cut is a fixed percentage, there's no financial motive for Apple to change the model. And developers are instant profit for Apple, even if they never sell a single app.
My sister used to run out into the garden to pick fresh broccoli to eat when she was a child. As an adult, she has been seen walking down the street munching on a head of raw broccoli.
Let's get TV out of the way - it's passive, dumbed-down, lowest common denominator entertainment.
Twilight, Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades of Grey...? The medium is NOT the message. Reading is not automatically less trashy than watching TV, or vice versa.
Smart kids learn despite their teachers. The underachieving kids are the ones who need direct and instruction.
A trap? Not really. From the developer's point of view, they'll still be able to get access to any changes to code on their terms, even if it is "tivoised". They can incorporate them into their code base without worrying too much about which hardware devices will or won't work - Somebody Else's Problem. They're interested in the code, not in "right to do whatever you want with your devices."
Surely a formally-proven OS doesn't want a traditional open-source license, because if you let people tinker, what you will end up with is forking... into unproven versions. And suddenly, the world's first formally-proven microkernel is just a plain old microkernel again.
OK, so maybe tinkering is alright as a personal hobby, but it risks the ecosystem.
The big manufacturers are all too busy competing with Apple to actually notice there might be a market for something else..
Quite. I never understood why Google didn't try to get a jump on Apple by speccing up an OS version for phones with D-pads for gamers at first launch. Look at the mess and fragmentation that we ended up with in third-party accessory controllers for the first few generations, and there are still some compatibility kinks to trip you up...
How long is anyone realistically going to be using a VR headset for daily?
I thought OLED's biggest problem was UV stimulating chemical decomposition. If so, surely the laws of physics say an OLED display in a black box with two small eyeholes is going to last much longer than a mobile phone display that is often used in direct sunlight...?
It's a direct quote - you don't copyedit errors out of direct quotes.
"Except" nothing. We always knew there were spies. the point is that having a particular political or social view does not make you automatically a spy, or an enemy of the state.
Capitalism is about ownership of the means of production. Property rights exist even in feudal societies - even if everything can be confiscated by your divine ruler, until it is, it's yours.
capitalism != democracy. The two often appear together (see "bourgeois-democratic revolution") but either can exist in the absence of the other. This may seem a trivial point, particularly when you were just trying to make a joke, but it's a serious issue that most people don't thing enough about - they bundle a large number of ideological and practical philosophies together and claim they're one thing.
The classic example would be religion and morality. The unthinking religious person sees morality as being an inseparable component of his religion, with the consequence that anyone not of his religion must be immoral, or at the very least amoral. This leads to interreligion conflicts, and atheist vs religious conflicts, and everyone ends up worse off.
Socialism is governance for the good of society. Communism is governance for the good of the commune. These are established definitions. You can decide to let people who abuse the terms redefine them to their own ends, but in doing so, you grant them the power they seek. There are many in the world today who claim their atrocities are right, and done in the name of their god - and this includes right-wing Christians and Jews, not only radical Muslims. Should we allow them to do this, or should we point out that that they are breaking the fundamental tenets of Abrahamic law? If we attack all Muslims for the actions of fundamentalist crackpots, we alienate moderate Muslims. If we attack anyone who believes in the concept of a welfare state as being supports of Stalinist gulags, we alienate them.
What about the fact that many of the world's worst corporate fraudsters go unpunished...?
Ludditism and Communist thought often co-occur, but the majority of serious Communists saw automation as a way to free the proletariat. The goal was to use automation to spread the wealth and reduce working hours, rather than using it as a way to reduce employment and further concentrate wealth in the hands of the few.
Adam Smith is generally credited with being the founder of capitalism, with his book The Wealth of Nations. However, the book reads more easily as a communist tract, as he proposes the collectivisation of labour -- workers' coops, essentially -- and industrialisation as a means to increase efficiency and therefore individual wealth. Smith's argument that a conscientious pinmaker could make enough pins and save enough money to automate failed to consider the effects of automation elsewhere, which meant that the unautomated pinmaker was likely to be forced out of business by falling prices.
He glossed right over the rise of the industrialist capitalist - the man who had enough money to set up a factory, therefore making enough money to set up another, and so on ad infinitum. It continues to this day that those who start with money can squeeze the new players out.
Remember also that the industrialists had people working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. They invented he night shift for their own profit, not for the quality of the product, nor in order to provide employment. In the industrial revolution, workers were less valuable than manure.
So it's not surprising that many people associated automation with slavery, but it's a shame. As I said, communist thought says automation should serve the commune (NB: not "the state") and free everyone to have more leisure time.
But leisure time is dangerous in a totalitarian regime, so the nominally-communist dictator will play up the "machinery is capitalism" myth in order to aid him in maintaining control.
Of course. A corporation is a legal "person" in the US, and they're persons with much greater expenses than (for example) a disabled single mother, so of course they need more welfare. Only a commie would suggest otherwise!
Communism causes Stasi.
So does capitalism cause House Committee on Un-American Activities?
And what's the difference between the two anyway?
I think his point is that e theoretical free-market that serves the consumer's every need is a myth, and that companies diddle the books to look good rather than making a decent product. I can empathise with this view.
You still have to understand the concepts of computational transforms, though, and most programmers don't.
Man, I haven't even mentioned the numerical computing. ...
As an exception, it is simply obscures the subject of the discussion.
I didn't mention it either. I'm talking about data transforms in general, and the fact that most people can't see the wide applicability of computational transforms to data manipulation tasks that are not strictly numeric is precisely the problem I'm referring to. I'm currently applying the concepts of transformations to manipulating abstract data types and tree structures, because my first attempt at doing it algorithmically resulted in a codebase that was growing exponentially in size with every new case included.
In abstracting all my data manipulations as computational transformations, I can combine them in arbitrary ways, just as can be done with matrix transforms, thus eliminating the need to write explicit code for every individual case.
Internal politics...?
I did Computer Science at Edinburgh University as my first degree, and it was very academic and non-vocational. Employers often criticised our syllabus as being irrelevant, but if I'd spent my university years learning Java, I wouldn't be doing what I am today. (Private enterprise development work on a hopefully-revolutionary natural language processing application.) University should teach you as much as possible to open your potential. The US system may be broken, but that is not a direct consequence of having an academic focus, more on politics and economics.
The big thing holding back computing is that computer programmers tend to think only in terms of algorithmics, and not in terms of (mathematical) computation. Computation in mathematics allows all sorts of funky stuff, and the only area where it is commonly applied is in vector manipulation. Applying matrices to matrices to matrices allows us to create infinite combinations of reusable transforms, which can then be applied to all the vertices in a 3D model at a low cost. Applying a series of algorithmic procedures to manipulate the same data would be unworkably slow. Algothmic programming results in lots of unintended interactions, and hard-to-track phantom bugs in the code. Computation is harder to start with, but it scales so much better and results in much more stable projects.
Maybe because a lot of the fieldwork is unpaid overtime, so theoretically not "at work"..? No, you're right. Work is work, wherever you are.