They were definitely referring to android/iOS tablets, which have all these push notifications and easy access to everything all the time, which is definately distracting to the average person. The average person also uses those as e-readers. A few years ago in the subway all you saw was kindles. Now you see a few (I see a bunch every day), but they're definitely outnumbered by people reading books on ipads or on their phones.
I'm still addicted to my kindle though and is my device of choice during my commute. The tablet is for when I want to browse the web.
Many developers ARE famous. If you're a dev who created some very popular/well known open source framework, you probably have an army trying to get to you. You're basically a celebrity, and in the extreme case may have to end up dealing with things like one.
My employer has been trying to build a front end team recently, and willing to pay whatever it takes and remote work is fine. But even getting in touch with some of these people to be able to say "Hey, name a number, we'll give you that number" is near impossible, because they shut themselves out with all of the normal recruiters trying to reach them.
Then you have the "not famous, but very good" devs. The average shitty dev still get a seemingly infinite amount of recruiters reaching out to them. The ones that are actually good? Yeah, its crazy. And if they don't want to go to work for a well known company (ie: Google), and actually have to poke around the market to find a good match, it can be more work than a full time job and a half. If you're looking and have an actually useful recruiter under your belt, its helpful, but at the end of the day they don't work for you. Having someone who actually does? Why not.
Its a pretty big deal actually. If every time you go to the store, they accept Apple Pay but not Google Wallet, and you're into that kind of thing, eventually you're going to get annoyed and buy a damn iphone.
And yet your card still worked, so it had a magstrip. And when I go back home to visit family (I'm canadian living in the US), my american cards work fine up there too. So someone could still clone your card, and use the copy. The only thing making it a little trickier is the fact you don't have to hand over the card, but there are ways around that (like a hacked up terminal). There are also vulnerabilities in the chip cards.
What is really protecting you is that the bank will cover your ass if something happen to it. This is also why no one gives a damn south of the border: pretty much no one ever really gets hurt when their card gets cloned. Call the bank and it will be done and over with 2 days later.
But with the chip cards, banks tend to be reluctant to help when your card gets owned. They still generally take care of it, but you have to argue a bit more.
So really, in the end it doesn't change a whole lot. Its easier to exploit magstrips, for now. And then you have all the chip cards that have NFC, and that's a whole other can of worm.
The one thing I'll give you is how its fucking annoying to have someone run away with your card at the restaurant, though some restaurants do have it (ie: Legal Seafood)
Woo, and now a company can't have its own internal CA deployed automatically. And how would software with their own certificate store (ie: Firefox doesn't use the system store) be able to harden itself so much? Its just a piece of software like any other.
And its probably not a "globally wildcarded certificate" that's deployed to the browser, its just a CA. And if a CA is trusted, it can sign arbitrary certificates. You want to be able to do this automatically at least in corporate environment, and manually for development tools.
Because somehow Apple doesn't get hit with anti-trust suits over it because anyone with the power to hit them is using an iphone and wouldn't want their convenience to take a hit.
The rest of the world however, has to at least give the law some lip service.
As someone in a relationship of 11 years and going (about half of that married) with someone I met online... The thing with starting with someone you know meet face to face, is that the first criterias that got you together is physical location and possibly physical appearance. The former is definitely convenient, the later is necessary to most people, but neither are usually the first thing of importance for a potential long running relationship.
If the first thing that gets you with someone is some kind of mutual interest (in my case, it was videogames and computer science interests), you start from there, there happens to be physical appeal too, and then you fix the location, things are much more likely to work out.
You can do that in person to with specialty interest groups (ie: I could have met someone at PAX or something...), and things can go wrong if you do it wrong (pick someone by their picture on match.com), but generally, it seems to be by far the easiest way to go, meet online by interest.
If I put up a torrent of your favorite game, but I hacked up the internals so its different in a way that you can't tell them apart to screw you over for my own benefit...it would be pretty bad.
In the same way, if when you come to buy my copy of some miniature, and you can't tell them apart, but an expert can look at it and notice I made it out shittier material or I wasn't quite faithful to the original.... someone would be pissed.
My point wasn't about devices/patents, but pieces of art/copyrights (ie: miniatures). Its pretty damn easy to copy it after the artist did the original design/color/etc and someone made the matching 3d model.
At this point Uber is known mainly for UberX, but that's not their only product, and its not even how they started either.
I started using Uber for Uber Black, which was (and still kind of is) a mid range/upscale product, depending on how you look at it. Its not the product that gives them their crazy valuation, but there's still more to Uber than walmart-model taxi.
I'm more worried about collectibles. Its niche, but a niche a lot of people on this board probably feel for. Its bad enough with figures and stuff, trying not to get ripped off at conventions or online... Soon it will be rampant.
That said, the vast majority of use will probably be for commodities anyway... Whoops, all my forks are in the dishwasher, time to 3d print one (when the printers get fast enough to make stuff in a pinch)
For software, generally speaking the copy is exactly the same as the original. No one collects software (only their medium), and its unlimited.
Even with 3d printers, objects are limited (you can't copy them indefinitely, you'll run out of material), and right now at least, until star trek replicators happen, they're not the same as the original (unless the original was 3d printed too i guess). There can be difference in qualities, and the originals may be collectibles... just like a painting can be replicated, but its the original that's worth something.
So being able to tell the originals from the copies apart kind of matters this time around.
There's a 4th reason that gets tossed around that I've never seen actually validated with the idea of "reusing code on the backend and the front-end" but I've never seen a case where that was actually a good idea since it involves exposing so much logic.
In a lot of fields you basically don't have a choice but to render stuff on the server side, for SEO, initial performance, etc. Depends on the field, but in giant e-commerce and whatsnot, you don't really get to choose here. So thats a given. Thus, if you want to be able to use javascript based UI...you either duplicate code, or you go isomorphic.
With stuff like React or Meteor, isomorphic isn't that hard. So its becoming semi-common, when it makes sense.
Node processes its own logic in 1 thread, but it still has multi-process support. So you can use clusters to have multiple instances running at once, or go old school with spawn/fork. It does confirm what you said: it is an old technology as far as multi-core goes, and you're not going to be writing a ray tracer this way.
For I/O intensive load though, just use clustering to have 1 instance per logical core and you're golden.
Node's claim to fame is really just its async-first I/O design. Some other environments are bringing that in now, along with a strong threading model (ie:.NET, between almost everything new being async by default, and the async/await coroutine syntax), but the culture/ecosystem around it aren't following. Also, if your only easily parallel tasks are I/O bound, you're not getting much more out of it than you would in node.js.
Node however, is NOT simple, it just looks simple. Its absurd stream design and error handling alone means that on any reasonably complex application, you need to be one hell of a debugging guru to figure out whats wrong. A junior dev will run home crying, while the same things in most other languages are pretty trivial.
If you're not building a scripting tool (ie: a css compiler or something), don't need javascript on your server for isomorphic apps and you don't benefit from the threading and I/O model in your workflow (ie: your app is CPU bound), stay far, far away.
Now that pre-compilation is pretty much pervasive in any advanced browser development, you DO have "real alternatives" to ES5 (probably what you're referring to if you're mentioning being stuck with it).
CoffeeScript, TypeScript, ES6, Clojure, hell, Scala is available, and you can use Java with stuff like GWT (imo sucks, but Amazon thought it was great for a while).
People keep going back to JavaScript because, aside for a couple of stupid things (a lot of which are fixed with strict mode and ES6 constructs), its actually pretty damn good, and some things that used to be considered hacks or half baked, like prototypical inheritance, are starting to be viewed as superior to the alternative, with good reasons.
But even without that, the reason people will use node on the server, when its not for isomorphic app (which btw, is a REALLY good way to build your app, if you can afford the development overhead and care about your customers), is because the threading model of Node/V8 has very interesting performance and scaling characteristics for I/O heavy applications. It can scale like fucking crazy. http://blog.caustik.com/2012/04/10/node-js-w250k-concurrent-connections
Dependency management on the JVM and the CLR is hard, so Maven is "a lot more than a build tool". In many other environments, dependency management is "comoditized". No one gives a fuck about the build tool being able to handle dependencies in Ruby-land or Node-world. Gem and Npm are good enough. Not perfect, but good enough.
So then you're left with only the actual build tool, and Maven/Ant/whatever are pretty bad at it. Sufficient, but still bad.
If was still young and in relationships that require condoms, you can bet your ass I'd _ALSO_ be using this (not instead. ALSO.)
Condoms break, girls lie about taking pills. Futures are ruinned. Hormones make sure teenagers can't think straight when it happens. Rightists make sure its as hard as possible to fix problems after they happen (even if you're in an area where stuff like Plan B is readily available, there's often still a stigma behind it, and then hesitation makes the time window slip by, and then more drastic measures are the only option...and its how your life gets fucked).
I never ended up in a situation where it got to be an issue, but if this had been available, I would have jumped on it. A little peace of mind doesn't hurt.
New languages are useful when they introduce vastly different paradigms: not necessarily something new in itself, but something that they bring as a first class citizen of their ecosystem.
Take Ruby vs Python. Different syntax (both are either a marvel of software engineering masturbation, or the worse thing since Global Warming, depending on who you ask), but aside for that, conceptually, they're very similar. They can be used as scripting language, they have dynamic features, they're fairly high level. Their ecosystem is also similar, from the way packages are maintained, to what they're used for.
The primary differences as to why they're used, like python's math libraries (which have been facilitated by some of the language's particularities, but still), or Rails, could have happened anywhere. One of those 2 languages is largely redundant, but the category of languages they belong to, is not.
C/C++/Objective C/Go/Whatever could also be bucketed together, but the category is useful: higher level languages that have native compilation as one of their core, and the ecosystem revolving around them reflects that.
Java/C#/Scala as the languages with more sophisticated underlying runtimes/garbage collectors, etc.
JavaScript on Node.js, while it may look a bit like Ruby because of the ecosystem, has interesting/useful performance characteristics, and is useful in itself because it allows one to use the same language they are semi-forced to use in web apps, everywhere else. There's value to that.
The list goes on, but not much. You only really need 1 language per "category", and everything else is redundant, with a few outlier languages that bring some values on their own. Adding another yet another functional JVM language is useless. Making another loosely typed yet OOP scripting language with a package manager and built in REPL for web development would be fucking pointless. Another natively compiled language to compete with C++, when C++ 2014 has most of the modern features, would be another waste of time unless it does something REALLY different, because you then need to interop or rewrite all of the C++ ecosystem.
The Ruby/Python/Node/Blah category seems to be the biggest offender by far. There's so many fucking variations at this point, its ridiculous. All of the JavaScript replacements with transpilers are also just syntax masturbation and bring nothing of value. AtScript vs TypeScript vs CoffeeScript...lol.
The Wordpress script kiddies? I agree with you for those. But serious web development lately is pretty damn sophisticated. Long gone are the days where you just patched up a few snippets of DHTML/JavaScript you found online and whipped out a bit of photoshop and you were done. Those things have been done and they're solved problems. The real world is just as much engineering as any else you'd call such.
Lately, authors of new languages do it more for mental masturbation than to produce anything useful. And one of the things that get them off, is seeing how many tokens they can remove while still being able to parse it.
Thats why so many new languages have python-like syntax.
Almost everyone learns basic human biology, or at least some biology (did you do the pig heart/eye thing in junior high?), and got some basic legals in family economics.
Slashdot Mirror
They were definitely referring to android/iOS tablets, which have all these push notifications and easy access to everything all the time, which is definately distracting to the average person. The average person also uses those as e-readers. A few years ago in the subway all you saw was kindles. Now you see a few (I see a bunch every day), but they're definitely outnumbered by people reading books on ipads or on their phones.
I'm still addicted to my kindle though and is my device of choice during my commute. The tablet is for when I want to browse the web.
Many developers ARE famous. If you're a dev who created some very popular/well known open source framework, you probably have an army trying to get to you. You're basically a celebrity, and in the extreme case may have to end up dealing with things like one.
My employer has been trying to build a front end team recently, and willing to pay whatever it takes and remote work is fine. But even getting in touch with some of these people to be able to say "Hey, name a number, we'll give you that number" is near impossible, because they shut themselves out with all of the normal recruiters trying to reach them.
Then you have the "not famous, but very good" devs. The average shitty dev still get a seemingly infinite amount of recruiters reaching out to them. The ones that are actually good? Yeah, its crazy. And if they don't want to go to work for a well known company (ie: Google), and actually have to poke around the market to find a good match, it can be more work than a full time job and a half. If you're looking and have an actually useful recruiter under your belt, its helpful, but at the end of the day they don't work for you. Having someone who actually does? Why not.
Its a pretty big deal actually. If every time you go to the store, they accept Apple Pay but not Google Wallet, and you're into that kind of thing, eventually you're going to get annoyed and buy a damn iphone.
And yet your card still worked, so it had a magstrip. And when I go back home to visit family (I'm canadian living in the US), my american cards work fine up there too. So someone could still clone your card, and use the copy. The only thing making it a little trickier is the fact you don't have to hand over the card, but there are ways around that (like a hacked up terminal). There are also vulnerabilities in the chip cards.
What is really protecting you is that the bank will cover your ass if something happen to it. This is also why no one gives a damn south of the border: pretty much no one ever really gets hurt when their card gets cloned. Call the bank and it will be done and over with 2 days later.
But with the chip cards, banks tend to be reluctant to help when your card gets owned. They still generally take care of it, but you have to argue a bit more.
So really, in the end it doesn't change a whole lot. Its easier to exploit magstrips, for now. And then you have all the chip cards that have NFC, and that's a whole other can of worm.
The one thing I'll give you is how its fucking annoying to have someone run away with your card at the restaurant, though some restaurants do have it (ie: Legal Seafood)
Woo, and now a company can't have its own internal CA deployed automatically. And how would software with their own certificate store (ie: Firefox doesn't use the system store) be able to harden itself so much? Its just a piece of software like any other.
And its probably not a "globally wildcarded certificate" that's deployed to the browser, its just a CA. And if a CA is trusted, it can sign arbitrary certificates. You want to be able to do this automatically at least in corporate environment, and manually for development tools.
Because somehow Apple doesn't get hit with anti-trust suits over it because anyone with the power to hit them is using an iphone and wouldn't want their convenience to take a hit.
The rest of the world however, has to at least give the law some lip service.
Kittens are much cuter than human babies ever will be.
As someone in a relationship of 11 years and going (about half of that married) with someone I met online... The thing with starting with someone you know meet face to face, is that the first criterias that got you together is physical location and possibly physical appearance. The former is definitely convenient, the later is necessary to most people, but neither are usually the first thing of importance for a potential long running relationship.
If the first thing that gets you with someone is some kind of mutual interest (in my case, it was videogames and computer science interests), you start from there, there happens to be physical appeal too, and then you fix the location, things are much more likely to work out.
You can do that in person to with specialty interest groups (ie: I could have met someone at PAX or something...), and things can go wrong if you do it wrong (pick someone by their picture on match.com), but generally, it seems to be by far the easiest way to go, meet online by interest.
If I put up a torrent of your favorite game, but I hacked up the internals so its different in a way that you can't tell them apart to screw you over for my own benefit...it would be pretty bad.
In the same way, if when you come to buy my copy of some miniature, and you can't tell them apart, but an expert can look at it and notice I made it out shittier material or I wasn't quite faithful to the original.... someone would be pissed.
My point wasn't about devices/patents, but pieces of art/copyrights (ie: miniatures). Its pretty damn easy to copy it after the artist did the original design/color/etc and someone made the matching 3d model.
At this point Uber is known mainly for UberX, but that's not their only product, and its not even how they started either.
I started using Uber for Uber Black, which was (and still kind of is) a mid range/upscale product, depending on how you look at it. Its not the product that gives them their crazy valuation, but there's still more to Uber than walmart-model taxi.
I'm more worried about collectibles. Its niche, but a niche a lot of people on this board probably feel for. Its bad enough with figures and stuff, trying not to get ripped off at conventions or online... Soon it will be rampant.
That said, the vast majority of use will probably be for commodities anyway... Whoops, all my forks are in the dishwasher, time to 3d print one (when the printers get fast enough to make stuff in a pinch)
For software, generally speaking the copy is exactly the same as the original. No one collects software (only their medium), and its unlimited.
Even with 3d printers, objects are limited (you can't copy them indefinitely, you'll run out of material), and right now at least, until star trek replicators happen, they're not the same as the original (unless the original was 3d printed too i guess). There can be difference in qualities, and the originals may be collectibles... just like a painting can be replicated, but its the original that's worth something.
So being able to tell the originals from the copies apart kind of matters this time around.
Monoprice hdmi cables are also gold plated and are 3-5 bucks on a normal day anyway.
In a lot of fields you basically don't have a choice but to render stuff on the server side, for SEO, initial performance, etc. Depends on the field, but in giant e-commerce and whatsnot, you don't really get to choose here. So thats a given. Thus, if you want to be able to use javascript based UI...you either duplicate code, or you go isomorphic.
With stuff like React or Meteor, isomorphic isn't that hard. So its becoming semi-common, when it makes sense.
Node processes its own logic in 1 thread, but it still has multi-process support. So you can use clusters to have multiple instances running at once, or go old school with spawn/fork. It does confirm what you said: it is an old technology as far as multi-core goes, and you're not going to be writing a ray tracer this way.
For I/O intensive load though, just use clustering to have 1 instance per logical core and you're golden.
Node's claim to fame is really just its async-first I/O design. Some other environments are bringing that in now, along with a strong threading model (ie: .NET, between almost everything new being async by default, and the async/await coroutine syntax), but the culture/ecosystem around it aren't following. Also, if your only easily parallel tasks are I/O bound, you're not getting much more out of it than you would in node.js.
Node however, is NOT simple, it just looks simple. Its absurd stream design and error handling alone means that on any reasonably complex application, you need to be one hell of a debugging guru to figure out whats wrong. A junior dev will run home crying, while the same things in most other languages are pretty trivial.
If you're not building a scripting tool (ie: a css compiler or something), don't need javascript on your server for isomorphic apps and you don't benefit from the threading and I/O model in your workflow (ie: your app is CPU bound), stay far, far away.
Now that pre-compilation is pretty much pervasive in any advanced browser development, you DO have "real alternatives" to ES5 (probably what you're referring to if you're mentioning being stuck with it).
CoffeeScript, TypeScript, ES6, Clojure, hell, Scala is available, and you can use Java with stuff like GWT (imo sucks, but Amazon thought it was great for a while).
People keep going back to JavaScript because, aside for a couple of stupid things (a lot of which are fixed with strict mode and ES6 constructs), its actually pretty damn good, and some things that used to be considered hacks or half baked, like prototypical inheritance, are starting to be viewed as superior to the alternative, with good reasons.
But even without that, the reason people will use node on the server, when its not for isomorphic app (which btw, is a REALLY good way to build your app, if you can afford the development overhead and care about your customers), is because the threading model of Node/V8 has very interesting performance and scaling characteristics for I/O heavy applications. It can scale like fucking crazy. http://blog.caustik.com/2012/04/10/node-js-w250k-concurrent-connections
Dependency management on the JVM and the CLR is hard, so Maven is "a lot more than a build tool". In many other environments, dependency management is "comoditized". No one gives a fuck about the build tool being able to handle dependencies in Ruby-land or Node-world. Gem and Npm are good enough. Not perfect, but good enough.
So then you're left with only the actual build tool, and Maven/Ant/whatever are pretty bad at it. Sufficient, but still bad.
Totally agree. Thats why I don't have a license and I just use the subway (even though I'm in my thirties).
I space out way too much and then to ram in the wall when walking out to work. I just prefer to let someone else do the driving =P
W...ah...wo.....I don't even....
I don't know where to start, but I already typed this much, so I'll just hit the submit button below one of the most epic fail post of all time.
Even if its a joke, it takes skills to write something like that. I clap at your trolling abilities, oh great master.
If was still young and in relationships that require condoms, you can bet your ass I'd _ALSO_ be using this (not instead. ALSO.)
Condoms break, girls lie about taking pills. Futures are ruinned. Hormones make sure teenagers can't think straight when it happens. Rightists make sure its as hard as possible to fix problems after they happen (even if you're in an area where stuff like Plan B is readily available, there's often still a stigma behind it, and then hesitation makes the time window slip by, and then more drastic measures are the only option...and its how your life gets fucked).
I never ended up in a situation where it got to be an issue, but if this had been available, I would have jumped on it. A little peace of mind doesn't hurt.
New languages are useful when they introduce vastly different paradigms: not necessarily something new in itself, but something that they bring as a first class citizen of their ecosystem.
Take Ruby vs Python. Different syntax (both are either a marvel of software engineering masturbation, or the worse thing since Global Warming, depending on who you ask), but aside for that, conceptually, they're very similar. They can be used as scripting language, they have dynamic features, they're fairly high level. Their ecosystem is also similar, from the way packages are maintained, to what they're used for.
The primary differences as to why they're used, like python's math libraries (which have been facilitated by some of the language's particularities, but still), or Rails, could have happened anywhere. One of those 2 languages is largely redundant, but the category of languages they belong to, is not.
C/C++/Objective C/Go/Whatever could also be bucketed together, but the category is useful: higher level languages that have native compilation as one of their core, and the ecosystem revolving around them reflects that.
Java/C#/Scala as the languages with more sophisticated underlying runtimes/garbage collectors, etc.
JavaScript on Node.js, while it may look a bit like Ruby because of the ecosystem, has interesting/useful performance characteristics, and is useful in itself because it allows one to use the same language they are semi-forced to use in web apps, everywhere else. There's value to that.
The list goes on, but not much. You only really need 1 language per "category", and everything else is redundant, with a few outlier languages that bring some values on their own. Adding another yet another functional JVM language is useless. Making another loosely typed yet OOP scripting language with a package manager and built in REPL for web development would be fucking pointless. Another natively compiled language to compete with C++, when C++ 2014 has most of the modern features, would be another waste of time unless it does something REALLY different, because you then need to interop or rewrite all of the C++ ecosystem.
The Ruby/Python/Node/Blah category seems to be the biggest offender by far. There's so many fucking variations at this point, its ridiculous. All of the JavaScript replacements with transpilers are also just syntax masturbation and bring nothing of value. AtScript vs TypeScript vs CoffeeScript...lol.
The Wordpress script kiddies? I agree with you for those. But serious web development lately is pretty damn sophisticated. Long gone are the days where you just patched up a few snippets of DHTML/JavaScript you found online and whipped out a bit of photoshop and you were done. Those things have been done and they're solved problems. The real world is just as much engineering as any else you'd call such.
Lately, authors of new languages do it more for mental masturbation than to produce anything useful. And one of the things that get them off, is seeing how many tokens they can remove while still being able to parse it.
Thats why so many new languages have python-like syntax.
Almost everyone learns basic human biology, or at least some biology (did you do the pig heart/eye thing in junior high?), and got some basic legals in family economics.
Some basic programming makes a lot of sense too.