What you *can* do and what actually gets done are 2 very different things.
Fact, is, you pay $800 for a XOOM with a PC screen and there are hardly any apps that will take advantage of that screen.
The knock on iPad was it is "just a big iPod touch". Well, if you run iPhone/iPod apps on an iPad, then it is just a big iPod touch. You might as well just buy an iPod touch. But if you run iPad apps on an iPad, then it is a small Mac full-size PC class apps in half the size, double the battery life, and with multitouch. That is worth paying the $500 for.
With Android, you're being asked to pay the price of an iPad *and* an iPod touch just to run mini-apps.
If you just run the mini-apps, then why even buy the larger screen device? You buy the device to run the apps, so big apps cause users to want to buy the big device.
With the iPad, one of the surprises was that users basically don't run the mini-apps, even though they run great. When the iPad first came out, it was the fastest iOS device ever, it ran the existing app catalog really, really well. But I have an iPhone and iPad and run 2 completely different sets of apps on each device. You run the full-size browser, full-size email, and other full-size apps and when you switch to a mini-app, it's a context switch. You go from a PC context to a phone context.
iPad launched with 500 full-size apps, had 1000 within a month, and it has scaled up quickly from there to 65,000. These are not mini-apps like on a phone, they are full-size apps like on a PC. Many are directly ported from Mac or PC or game consoles. In many cases, you stop running the app on a Mac and start running it on an iPad.
So Honeycomb having only 20 full-size apps after a month is a drag. Android only supporting Java apps, which are mini-apps by nature, is also a drag. With a full-size device, you want a PC class native C app that takes full advantage of every pixel of the PC class 10-inch 1024x768 screen, you don't want a widget-sized app scaled up 2x.
You can prevent illness with unrestricted, regular access to a doctor, not just when the patient is sick, but when they are healthy, so the doctor can establish a baseline and recommend preventative care. You prevent illness by providing care to everyone, so that communicable diseases and infections are stamped out and don't spread.
That is what what you get in public healthcare systems, which is why Canadians are so much healthier than the US Americans who live right across the lake or river from them. And public health care systems cost much less, too. Canadians spend 10% of GDP to provide universal coverage; US Americans spend 20% to cover only a part of the population.
It's like the private insurance companies in the US insist on standing on their head, and they are asking if we can invent shoes for the head. Stand on your feet you stupid motherfuckers.
I've lived in 3 countries, including the US, and the healthcare in the US is just fucking pathetic. The people are visibly sick, they go around sick with untreated wounds and injuries. The doctors spend half of their time or more trying to come up with the funding for each and every thing they do. It is pure insanity.
Every month, the lack of a public healthcare system in the US kills the equivalent of the 9/11 attacks. Insane.
I guess mobiles were excluded from this study since IE9 doesn't run on them? Because anyone who cares about low-power browsing would have to swap in an ARM chip for Intel. And in practice they would be running MobileSafari on iPad which can browse the Web over Wi-Fi for 10-12 hours on a single charge with a smaller battery than any of the PC's Microsoft tested.
Basically, excluding mobiles is like doing a portability study and only including desktop PC's, not notebooks.
Even if you had to run an Intel chip and cared about low-power, obviously, you would run a Mac, which has way, way better power efficiency than Windows. The Mac manages the CPU and GPU better, uses the GPU exclusively for drawing the interface, and sleeps and wakes and idles much, much better than Windows.
So once again, we have Microsoft acting like the whole world is just Windows, and therefore not telling the whole story.
The World Wide Web only ran on OS X for the first year or two. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT workstation, which has since been unforked back into Apple and is very much alive in a MacBook Pro running OS X. There is an idea in this article like Linux is "real" Web development and OS X is not, but it is Linux that is the young upstart. The "grow up, use emacs" argument could easily be "grow up, use OS X." Both are older than Linux.
This is a troll, but not even a good troll. Everybody knows you can use Mac hardware as the high-end PC that it is. It is functionally equivalent to the heavier, lower battery-life ThinkPad he is lusting after as far as running Linux. That was even featured in one of those Mac/PC commercials called "Touché." The whole point was you can try Mac OS, but still use the Mac just as a PC ifmthat doesn't work for you. There are kids who were able to follow that process.
So if he feels lost and scared in unfamiliar OS X, then just install Linux. Or use the VM he already said he has to run Windows to also run Linux and just use the graphical part of Mac OS to run iMovie, GarageBand, PixelMator, and so on. He could also install Xcode, which has an iPad/iPhone simulator in it, adding MobileSafari to his browser collection.
Dude really needs to learn how to think his way out of a paper bag. If you can't find a use for a high-end PC that can run Mac OS, iOS, 3 versions of Windows, many versions of Linux, either natively or in multiple high-end virtualizers, then there is something wrong with *you*.
I wouldn't hire anyone with majority Windows experience in general. It speaks to their judgement. You decided to use Windows instead of a Mac or other UNIX? In this century? In San Francisco and Silicon Valley? I'm not impressed, because you are not going to know how to do the real version of a task. You're missing key tools. You're hobbled by Microsoft's involvement, not enabled.
For example, when interviewing Photoshop pros, I'm always looking for Wacom Tablet experience (it is amazing that people think they are "using Photoshop" with a mouse) and rarely does someone with Windows experience actually know how to use a tablet. I'm always looking for Photoshop automation experience, because there is a lot of grunt work in graphics, you can make it all go away with a little AppleScript. Rarely does a Windows user know how to automate Photoshop, because it is 1000 times harder on Windows. Further, Windows users don't know color management, which is a bolt-on for Windows, but built-into the Mac. Then a guy or gal comes in who knows Photoshop, the Mac, the Tablet, AppleScript, and ColorSync, and they can sit down and be immediately productive all day. And they won't need I-T help all day, either.
So I get what this guy is saying.
I have a chef friend who told me the most important lesson a chef can learn is to use great ingredients. She said a chef with organic, grass-fed beef and organic vegetables and a little olive oil and fresh oregano and garlic is going to out-cook a more-skilled chef who has to use typical mediocre supermarket ingredients. The great ingredients already have flavor from the start, and the mediocre ones lack flavor from the start. So she said when she is hiring people, the first thing she looks for is their attention to ingredients, because that means they are paying attention to the big picture, they are going to make more flavorful food no matter what circumstance you put them into, what kitchen, what challenge you set for them. I took her advice and even with my very limited cooking skills, I suddenly make great-tasting food because I start with great-tasting ingredients.
The equivalent advice I give people who ask me how can they make digital art or applications as good as mine is "get a Mac." Start with good ingredients like ColorSync, AppleScript, QuickTime, WebKit, Apache, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby. People come back to me a month or two later and thank me for making them into better artists with that one bit of advice in the same way I thanked my chef friend for dramatically improving my cooking by opening my eyes to the importance of ingredients.
Somebody who chooses to use a Windows machine in the 21st century is not paying attention to the big picture. They may be able to cook you a meal, they may know how to bake and broil, but they will not make you any great tasting food.
And if you are talking about mobile applications specifically, then somebody who went through 2008-2011 and did not get into Xcode? You have to wonder is their passion mobile apps? There is a whole PC replacement cycle between 2008-2011 and they didn't buy a Mac, on which you can also run Windows, so that they could make an iPhone or iPad app? Even with my limited Windows experience, if Microsoft had done iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010 instead of Apple, I would have a copy of Windows 7 and Visual Studio and would have made apps for those devices. So someone who spent 2008-2011 doing.NET is not part of the mobile game. You have to be suspicious of that person at an interview. You want somebody who makes mobile apps, not Microsoft apps.
Google is the ultimate walled garden. They built a wall around the entire fucking Web. You can't even opt-out. Privacy? Change your name.
Just compare Google Search to Blekko. For 1 week, do all your searches in both. You will see that Google Search is feeding you the sites with the most Google ads, not the most relevance.
And when they clone something and give it to you for free with their ads on it, that is like Microsoft cloning something and giving it to you for free with your Windows license. It's to keep you in the garden.
Compare to Apple, the devices have the best W3C, ISO, and other interoperability standards support, and there is an app for everything, from everyone. Netflix has 96% of Internet movies and has apps on all iOS devices, including Apple TV. Apple is the only name brand PC with UNIX, with hundreds of open source projects. Google itself is 75% Macs.
Ironically, you are inside Google's Reality Distortion Field, where inside their closed system, everything is "open".
So the OP is right. The free accessory products to Search are to keep users in, not to keep competitors out.
Google's brand used to be gold, now it is shit. They were seen as doing no wrong, but now it is the opposite. They used to be lauded for simplifying search and making it accessible, now they are known for complicated products. Their search engine is a spam engine.
I use Blekko for search, because it is the best, yet costs the same as Google. It is so much better than Google! I use Apple devices because they are the best, yet cost the same (or less) as their competitors. Even a free Android phone has a larger monthly bill than an iPhone and ends up more expensive. A XOOM is more expensive than an iPad in both retail and monthly, and does much less. A high-end generic PC has viruses and no UNIX and yet is the same price or more than a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. I use MobileMe email, it is better than Gmail and they don't read my email or share my contacts, that means it's cheaper overall even though they charge a few bucks for it. Further, Google has no idea about design or art, because they have no artists and no designers. They have no idea about consumers, they continue to search for nerds to build for, but nerds are a small minority of the tech world now, and lots of nerds are tired of configuring things every time they want to watch a movie or play a game or do some computing. Nerds are tired of getting spammed also. So even nerds are using Apple devices and Blekko and so on.
And why do Google's ads look so shitty? Facebook apps and iAds are only about 10,000 times more engaging.
So Google is beat on price, value, privacy, design, consumer-readiness, and engagement. How exactly is that a great big castle?
And they have a CEO with no experience, are bleeding talent to Facebook. They are in court with all kinds of things.
And how is Android impenetrable? It's basically owned by Oracle and Microsoft. It isn't even good open source. Compare it to WebKit, which is used by Apple's competitors, not just their partners.
I think we are just at the end of the Google era of the Web and it is hard for a lot of people to admit that party is over, even though they see the evidence of their own eyes.
This article is such a perfect example of nerds missing the point.
It doesn't matter if the header files cannot be copyrighted, the real issue is patents.
The fact that Dalvik is so similar in functionality to Java that the same exact header files were used, even had to be used, were copy-pasted, just strengthens Oracle's case that Dalvik infringes on Oracle's patents. The header files show that Dalvik is not just a mobile application environment, it is a mobile Java application environment. Exactly what Oracle says it is. Why would you go to the trouble of making such a work-alike when you can just license the original? Because you don't want to pay license fees. Exactly why Oracle says Google made Dalvik.
Imagine Google created a Google Video Disc (GVD) player and the patent holder on the DVD player sued, saying the GVD player infringes on DVD patents. Finding facts from the DVD specification (disc size, laser wavelength, etc.) in the GVD player code, even if such facts were not copyrightable, suggests that the GVD player is a work-alike of the DVD player and that strengthens the case that it infringes on DVD player patents. It suggests that GVD is not a separate video player implementation, it's a copy of a DVD player, made in such a way that it can play a video disc without having to pay license fees to the DVD patent holder.
The best part of the above analogy is that mobile Java is just as obsolete as the DVD. Google should ship Android v4 with a native C API and a functional HTML5 app environment, both of which iOS already has and Android lacks. Mobile Java is very, very 2006. You still want me to rewrite my C app in Java after I refused to do that for like 10 years now?
So if you are into Android, forget Oracle vs Google and start lobbying for Android development to catch up to 2007-2008. Yes, Dalvik is going to be impounded and destroyed. Yes, that will be one of the best things that ever happened to Android.
Moore's Law doesn't say chips get smaller, it says they get 2x the transistors every 18 months. It doesn't matter if chips hit a wall where transistors can't get smaller. As long as they continue to get cheaper, we will simply start growing by making bigger chips, or more chips, or 3D chips.
Further, we can get speed other ways: no moving parts, better software design and optimization, simplification. iOS v4.3 on a single core 1GHz ARM feels faster than Mac OS v10.6 on dual core 2GHz Intel because of factors other than Moore's Law.
And we get economic growth in other ways. Just getting out of the Wintel monopoly is better for business than Moore's Law. Just moving from IE6/FlashPlayer to HTML5 is better for business than Moore's Law. The Web jumping from PC-only onto smartphones in 2007 is better for business than Moore's Law, and had more to do with software than chips, which is why Apple did it, not Intel. These are all well underway, but many benefits are yet to be realized. The computer business has mostly lacked real competition for decades. It's getting healthier now and less reliant on Moore's Law to make things better for everyone every 18 months.
So in short, even if we hit a wall in Moore's Law in 2030, we won't care like we would if we had hit it in 2000.
Instead of messing around with ancient features, they should build something new that is simple. For example, in Mac OS Lion, the window close/minimize/zoom is the same, but there is a full screen mode apps can use that essentially gives an app its own virtual Desktop, and the user can flip through virtual Desktops with a simple gesture. So the window close/minimize/zoom ends up confined to just 1 of many virtual Desktops. You end up with say, 8 Desktops, 1 with windows, 1 with widgets, 6 with apps. There is way less window management. And yet, if the user wants to have windows on every Desktop, that is fine, too.
In other words, create a simpler new paradigm and move to that. Don't just remove features from the old paradigm.
I agree. Too bad he is not a master with HTML5 so I could see this video on the Web instead of having to go to my one computer that has FlashPlayer on it, especially when all of my GPU's have have hardware decoders for the same video file he is hiding in FlashPlayer, same as everyone else's GPU's.
I guess since Apple is bigger than HP+ Microsoft and 9 out of 10 $999+ PC's are Macs and iPad has created a whole new PC category that doesn't even have a Windows machine in it, I thought the Windows hegemony was already over. But now that Motorola created a 7th way to run Firefox without Windows (wow!) then I guess that was the final nail in the coffin.
There's a markup standard called W3C HTML5 with 100% deployment on every platform. There's an audio video standard called ISO MPEG-4 with 100% deployment on every platform. There's a photo standard called ISO JPEG with 100% deployment on every platform. Every PC, smartphone, and set-top comes out of the box with support for all of these standards and more. The ISO standards are hard coded into every GPU. The only issues are with legacy devices, but HTML5 provided many ways to deal with that until time takes care of it for good. For example, you provide fallback content for modern tags in your markup and you play ISO media in FlashPlayer or QuickTime Player on PC's with IE6-IE8 or Firefox. You still have 100% support.
So there is no need for running native code in the browser.
Windows is a tire fire of botnets and viruses. There are banks who give free iPads to their high value transaction customers so their money transfers don't end up in a malware author's account.
Charlie Miller, the guy who wins the Mac every year at pwn to own, recommends users buy Macs and refuse to install FlashPlayer if they want to be as safe as possible. Just the fact that Mac OS X no longer comes with FlashPlayer and Java reduces the attack surface.
I mean, just Unix and Software Update alone are better advantages than anything Windows has. It doesn't matter that Windows 7 has some tricks the Mac doesn't have when Windows 7 runs 80% of XP malware.
I have friends who take their Windows machine in twice a year to get malware cleaned off it. How can that possibly be safer than a platform that has no viruses?
And 90% of Mac users are using the latest version and receive patches automatically from Apple within a week. More than half of Windows users are on XP. It is pathetic.
> Apple is historically months > behind in patching publicly > disclosed vulnerabilities > in core libraries they share > with other Unix-like systems
First, we're talking about fucking Windows, not other Unix.
Apple is slower in deploying a patch than other Unix because it has to work for non-technical users, but then the patch goes out to 90% of the community within a week via their automatic Software Update system, and almost the entire 100% within a month. That removes the incentive to create a commercial exploit. There just aren't going to be enough users to exploit. On Windows, most machines are not up to date on their patches. It's results that matter — % of platform patched, value of exploits lowered — not just how fast you create a patch.
> Java
Mac OS X Lion does not ship with Java, and the Java that runs on it is made by Oracle.
Are you saying you recommend Windows over Mac to a non-technical user?
Even recommending another Unix to a Mac user is ridiculous, because they are not going to know how to patch it.
Really, the nerd-blindness in your comment is disheartening. Be practical.
I agree with your broader point about Yanks getting totally fucked over by corporations. I've lived in California, New York, Canada, and U.K. and the medical situation in the US is nothing short of a holocaust, with 40,000 killed per year. People here walk around sick like that is acceptable in a modern society. But even within this corporate propaganda bubble, 75% want universal health care. But the private health insurers paid off all the politicians, including President Obama, so it does not get done and people continue to suffer and die right next to doctor's offices and hospitals. It is just insane. There are movements here to privatize firefighters and cops it is like a bizarro Soviet Union, trying to kill itself with extremism.
However, the key point about work-related IP is not true in all states. In California, it is illegal for your employer to claim your IP from non-work endeavors. The states here are quasi-countries, there are tremendous differences between them. That is partly why the federal government always seems to be herding cats.
Yeah, but you get what you pay for. iOS developers make more money than Android developers, not less. Google does almost nothing for you. Apple does everything other than the actual development. And Apple offers you a larger user base in more countries and all with 1-click payment and install. And Apple is native C/C++/Objective-C development with Xcode and LLVM, not Java applets in a Dalvik engine that is going to be "impounded and destroyed" by a US court in the near future.
Please show me a field of endeavor where you keep 100% of the revenue. It doesn't exist. A 30% overhead for servers, credit card billing, deployment systems, etc. is very low. Apple also takes 30%, and you can see from their public financial records that they only keep 1/30th of that. So this is the split on Apple apps:
- developer 70% - Apple-administered overhead 29% - Apple 1%
That is great deal. Especially when the developer sets the retail price. Amazon used to keep 70% of eBooks before Apple came in with iBooks, where they keep 30%. And Amazon set the retail price also. In print publishing, the store keeps 75%. In music, if an artist gets 5% naw, that never happens.
In California, it is illegal for a company to claim ownership of ideas and work expressed in the employee's non-work hours. Not sure about Washington, but Microsoft calls the shots there in a big way. The US is not really one country, it is more equivalent to EU than to an individual European country. Some US states have the death penalty and some do not, for example.
However, in this case they would be submitting apps to Microsoft, so Microsoft would of course have to approve for them to be Windows Phone 7 developers. How grim to have 2 pointless Microsoft jobs, though.
I'm pretty sure Apple employees are excluded from App Store by default, but can get clearance from their boss to get their independent apps in. There are many App Store apps written independently by Apple employees.
Brain enhancement prosthetic, not another person
on
Talking To Computers?
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· Score: 1
You can tell a Mac to open programs and many other things by voice for well over 10 years now, and almost nobody uses it. You can tell an iPhone to make calls and many other things by voice for about 2 years now, and people use it only when forced, like when driving.
I think one reason this kind of thing is unpopular is it makes us realize how stupid computers are. Not even as smart as a small child. You have to construct your sentences even more carefully.
But I think the main reason it's unpopular is the computer is a brain enhancement prosthetic for our own brain, not another person's brain. It is a part of us. We don't want to hear the other half of our brain or our brain enhancement prosthetic talk to us.
However, I think we are willing to anthropomorphize some programs. For example, people do that with Google. That is a separate brain you call out to and ask a question.
Slashdot Mirror
What you *can* do and what actually gets done are 2 very different things.
Fact, is, you pay $800 for a XOOM with a PC screen and there are hardly any apps that will take advantage of that screen.
The knock on iPad was it is "just a big iPod touch". Well, if you run iPhone/iPod apps on an iPad, then it is just a big iPod touch. You might as well just buy an iPod touch. But if you run iPad apps on an iPad, then it is a small Mac full-size PC class apps in half the size, double the battery life, and with multitouch. That is worth paying the $500 for.
With Android, you're being asked to pay the price of an iPad *and* an iPod touch just to run mini-apps.
If you just run the mini-apps, then why even buy the larger screen device? You buy the device to run the apps, so big apps cause users to want to buy the big device.
With the iPad, one of the surprises was that users basically don't run the mini-apps, even though they run great. When the iPad first came out, it was the fastest iOS device ever, it ran the existing app catalog really, really well. But I have an iPhone and iPad and run 2 completely different sets of apps on each device. You run the full-size browser, full-size email, and other full-size apps and when you switch to a mini-app, it's a context switch. You go from a PC context to a phone context.
iPad launched with 500 full-size apps, had 1000 within a month, and it has scaled up quickly from there to 65,000. These are not mini-apps like on a phone, they are full-size apps like on a PC. Many are directly ported from Mac or PC or game consoles. In many cases, you stop running the app on a Mac and start running it on an iPad.
So Honeycomb having only 20 full-size apps after a month is a drag. Android only supporting Java apps, which are mini-apps by nature, is also a drag. With a full-size device, you want a PC class native C app that takes full advantage of every pixel of the PC class 10-inch 1024x768 screen, you don't want a widget-sized app scaled up 2x.
You can prevent illness with unrestricted, regular access to a doctor, not just when the patient is sick, but when they are healthy, so the doctor can establish a baseline and recommend preventative care. You prevent illness by providing care to everyone, so that communicable diseases and infections are stamped out and don't spread.
That is what what you get in public healthcare systems, which is why Canadians are so much healthier than the US Americans who live right across the lake or river from them. And public health care systems cost much less, too. Canadians spend 10% of GDP to provide universal coverage; US Americans spend 20% to cover only a part of the population.
It's like the private insurance companies in the US insist on standing on their head, and they are asking if we can invent shoes for the head. Stand on your feet you stupid motherfuckers.
I've lived in 3 countries, including the US, and the healthcare in the US is just fucking pathetic. The people are visibly sick, they go around sick with untreated wounds and injuries. The doctors spend half of their time or more trying to come up with the funding for each and every thing they do. It is pure insanity.
Every month, the lack of a public healthcare system in the US kills the equivalent of the 9/11 attacks. Insane.
I guess mobiles were excluded from this study since IE9 doesn't run on them? Because anyone who cares about low-power browsing would have to swap in an ARM chip for Intel. And in practice they would be running MobileSafari on iPad which can browse the Web over Wi-Fi for 10-12 hours on a single charge with a smaller battery than any of the PC's Microsoft tested.
Basically, excluding mobiles is like doing a portability study and only including desktop PC's, not notebooks.
Even if you had to run an Intel chip and cared about low-power, obviously, you would run a Mac, which has way, way better power efficiency than Windows. The Mac manages the CPU and GPU better, uses the GPU exclusively for drawing the interface, and sleeps and wakes and idles much, much better than Windows.
So once again, we have Microsoft acting like the whole world is just Windows, and therefore not telling the whole story.
The World Wide Web only ran on OS X for the first year or two. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT workstation, which has since been unforked back into Apple and is very much alive in a MacBook Pro running OS X. There is an idea in this article like Linux is "real" Web development and OS X is not, but it is Linux that is the young upstart. The "grow up, use emacs" argument could easily be "grow up, use OS X." Both are older than Linux.
This is a troll, but not even a good troll. Everybody knows you can use Mac hardware as the high-end PC that it is. It is functionally equivalent to the heavier, lower battery-life ThinkPad he is lusting after as far as running Linux. That was even featured in one of those Mac/PC commercials called "Touché." The whole point was you can try Mac OS, but still use the Mac just as a PC ifmthat doesn't work for you. There are kids who were able to follow that process.
So if he feels lost and scared in unfamiliar OS X, then just install Linux. Or use the VM he already said he has to run Windows to also run Linux and just use the graphical part of Mac OS to run iMovie, GarageBand, PixelMator, and so on. He could also install Xcode, which has an iPad/iPhone simulator in it, adding MobileSafari to his browser collection.
Dude really needs to learn how to think his way out of a paper bag. If you can't find a use for a high-end PC that can run Mac OS, iOS, 3 versions of Windows, many versions of Linux, either natively or in multiple high-end virtualizers, then there is something wrong with *you*.
I wouldn't hire anyone with majority Windows experience in general. It speaks to their judgement. You decided to use Windows instead of a Mac or other UNIX? In this century? In San Francisco and Silicon Valley? I'm not impressed, because you are not going to know how to do the real version of a task. You're missing key tools. You're hobbled by Microsoft's involvement, not enabled.
For example, when interviewing Photoshop pros, I'm always looking for Wacom Tablet experience (it is amazing that people think they are "using Photoshop" with a mouse) and rarely does someone with Windows experience actually know how to use a tablet. I'm always looking for Photoshop automation experience, because there is a lot of grunt work in graphics, you can make it all go away with a little AppleScript. Rarely does a Windows user know how to automate Photoshop, because it is 1000 times harder on Windows. Further, Windows users don't know color management, which is a bolt-on for Windows, but built-into the Mac. Then a guy or gal comes in who knows Photoshop, the Mac, the Tablet, AppleScript, and ColorSync, and they can sit down and be immediately productive all day. And they won't need I-T help all day, either.
So I get what this guy is saying.
I have a chef friend who told me the most important lesson a chef can learn is to use great ingredients. She said a chef with organic, grass-fed beef and organic vegetables and a little olive oil and fresh oregano and garlic is going to out-cook a more-skilled chef who has to use typical mediocre supermarket ingredients. The great ingredients already have flavor from the start, and the mediocre ones lack flavor from the start. So she said when she is hiring people, the first thing she looks for is their attention to ingredients, because that means they are paying attention to the big picture, they are going to make more flavorful food no matter what circumstance you put them into, what kitchen, what challenge you set for them. I took her advice and even with my very limited cooking skills, I suddenly make great-tasting food because I start with great-tasting ingredients.
The equivalent advice I give people who ask me how can they make digital art or applications as good as mine is "get a Mac." Start with good ingredients like ColorSync, AppleScript, QuickTime, WebKit, Apache, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby. People come back to me a month or two later and thank me for making them into better artists with that one bit of advice in the same way I thanked my chef friend for dramatically improving my cooking by opening my eyes to the importance of ingredients.
Somebody who chooses to use a Windows machine in the 21st century is not paying attention to the big picture. They may be able to cook you a meal, they may know how to bake and broil, but they will not make you any great tasting food.
And if you are talking about mobile applications specifically, then somebody who went through 2008-2011 and did not get into Xcode? You have to wonder is their passion mobile apps? There is a whole PC replacement cycle between 2008-2011 and they didn't buy a Mac, on which you can also run Windows, so that they could make an iPhone or iPad app? Even with my limited Windows experience, if Microsoft had done iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010 instead of Apple, I would have a copy of Windows 7 and Visual Studio and would have made apps for those devices. So someone who spent 2008-2011 doing .NET is not part of the mobile game. You have to be suspicious of that person at an interview. You want somebody who makes mobile apps, not Microsoft apps.
> No!
Yes.
Google is the ultimate walled garden. They built a wall around the entire fucking Web. You can't even opt-out. Privacy? Change your name.
Just compare Google Search to Blekko. For 1 week, do all your searches in both. You will see that Google Search is feeding you the sites with the most Google ads, not the most relevance.
And when they clone something and give it to you for free with their ads on it, that is like Microsoft cloning something and giving it to you for free with your Windows license. It's to keep you in the garden.
Compare to Apple, the devices have the best W3C, ISO, and other interoperability standards support, and there is an app for everything, from everyone. Netflix has 96% of Internet movies and has apps on all iOS devices, including Apple TV. Apple is the only name brand PC with UNIX, with hundreds of open source projects. Google itself is 75% Macs.
Ironically, you are inside Google's Reality Distortion Field, where inside their closed system, everything is "open".
So the OP is right. The free accessory products to Search are to keep users in, not to keep competitors out.
Same reason the chicken crossed the road: to sell more ads.
Google's brand used to be gold, now it is shit. They were seen as doing no wrong, but now it is the opposite. They used to be lauded for simplifying search and making it accessible, now they are known for complicated products. Their search engine is a spam engine.
I use Blekko for search, because it is the best, yet costs the same as Google. It is so much better than Google! I use Apple devices because they are the best, yet cost the same (or less) as their competitors. Even a free Android phone has a larger monthly bill than an iPhone and ends up more expensive. A XOOM is more expensive than an iPad in both retail and monthly, and does much less. A high-end generic PC has viruses and no UNIX and yet is the same price or more than a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. I use MobileMe email, it is better than Gmail and they don't read my email or share my contacts, that means it's cheaper overall even though they charge a few bucks for it. Further, Google has no idea about design or art, because they have no artists and no designers. They have no idea about consumers, they continue to search for nerds to build for, but nerds are a small minority of the tech world now, and lots of nerds are tired of configuring things every time they want to watch a movie or play a game or do some computing. Nerds are tired of getting spammed also. So even nerds are using Apple devices and Blekko and so on.
And why do Google's ads look so shitty? Facebook apps and iAds are only about 10,000 times more engaging.
So Google is beat on price, value, privacy, design, consumer-readiness, and engagement. How exactly is that a great big castle?
And they have a CEO with no experience, are bleeding talent to Facebook. They are in court with all kinds of things.
And how is Android impenetrable? It's basically owned by Oracle and Microsoft. It isn't even good open source. Compare it to WebKit, which is used by Apple's competitors, not just their partners.
I think we are just at the end of the Google era of the Web and it is hard for a lot of people to admit that party is over, even though they see the evidence of their own eyes.
This article is such a perfect example of nerds missing the point.
It doesn't matter if the header files cannot be copyrighted, the real issue is patents.
The fact that Dalvik is so similar in functionality to Java that the same exact header files were used, even had to be used, were copy-pasted, just strengthens Oracle's case that Dalvik infringes on Oracle's patents. The header files show that Dalvik is not just a mobile application environment, it is a mobile Java application environment. Exactly what Oracle says it is. Why would you go to the trouble of making such a work-alike when you can just license the original? Because you don't want to pay license fees. Exactly why Oracle says Google made Dalvik.
Imagine Google created a Google Video Disc (GVD) player and the patent holder on the DVD player sued, saying the GVD player infringes on DVD patents. Finding facts from the DVD specification (disc size, laser wavelength, etc.) in the GVD player code, even if such facts were not copyrightable, suggests that the GVD player is a work-alike of the DVD player and that strengthens the case that it infringes on DVD player patents. It suggests that GVD is not a separate video player implementation, it's a copy of a DVD player, made in such a way that it can play a video disc without having to pay license fees to the DVD patent holder.
The best part of the above analogy is that mobile Java is just as obsolete as the DVD. Google should ship Android v4 with a native C API and a functional HTML5 app environment, both of which iOS already has and Android lacks. Mobile Java is very, very 2006. You still want me to rewrite my C app in Java after I refused to do that for like 10 years now?
So if you are into Android, forget Oracle vs Google and start lobbying for Android development to catch up to 2007-2008. Yes, Dalvik is going to be impounded and destroyed. Yes, that will be one of the best things that ever happened to Android.
Moore's Law doesn't say chips get smaller, it says they get 2x the transistors every 18 months. It doesn't matter if chips hit a wall where transistors can't get smaller. As long as they continue to get cheaper, we will simply start growing by making bigger chips, or more chips, or 3D chips.
Further, we can get speed other ways: no moving parts, better software design and optimization, simplification. iOS v4.3 on a single core 1GHz ARM feels faster than Mac OS v10.6 on dual core 2GHz Intel because of factors other than Moore's Law.
And we get economic growth in other ways. Just getting out of the Wintel monopoly is better for business than Moore's Law. Just moving from IE6/FlashPlayer to HTML5 is better for business than Moore's Law. The Web jumping from PC-only onto smartphones in 2007 is better for business than Moore's Law, and had more to do with software than chips, which is why Apple did it, not Intel. These are all well underway, but many benefits are yet to be realized. The computer business has mostly lacked real competition for decades. It's getting healthier now and less reliant on Moore's Law to make things better for everyone every 18 months.
So in short, even if we hit a wall in Moore's Law in 2030, we won't care like we would if we had hit it in 2000.
they will fix it.
Yeah, pulp fiction books need to be cheap. If I can buy a movie of a pulp fiction book for $10 then yes the book should be 99 cents.
Plus, a Kindle book is throwaway, just a printout with DRN. If you want to charge more, you have to build something more.
Instead of messing around with ancient features, they should build something new that is simple. For example, in Mac OS Lion, the window close/minimize/zoom is the same, but there is a full screen mode apps can use that essentially gives an app its own virtual Desktop, and the user can flip through virtual Desktops with a simple gesture. So the window close/minimize/zoom ends up confined to just 1 of many virtual Desktops. You end up with say, 8 Desktops, 1 with windows, 1 with widgets, 6 with apps. There is way less window management. And yet, if the user wants to have windows on every Desktop, that is fine, too.
In other words, create a simpler new paradigm and move to that. Don't just remove features from the old paradigm.
I agree. Too bad he is not a master with HTML5 so I could see this video on the Web instead of having to go to my one computer that has FlashPlayer on it, especially when all of my GPU's have have hardware decoders for the same video file he is hiding in FlashPlayer, same as everyone else's GPU's.
I guess since Apple is bigger than HP+ Microsoft and 9 out of 10 $999+ PC's are Macs and iPad has created a whole new PC category that doesn't even have a Windows machine in it, I thought the Windows hegemony was already over. But now that Motorola created a 7th way to run Firefox without Windows (wow!) then I guess that was the final nail in the coffin.
There's a markup standard called W3C HTML5 with 100% deployment on every platform. There's an audio video standard called ISO MPEG-4 with 100% deployment on every platform. There's a photo standard called ISO JPEG with 100% deployment on every platform. Every PC, smartphone, and set-top comes out of the box with support for all of these standards and more. The ISO standards are hard coded into every GPU. The only issues are with legacy devices, but HTML5 provided many ways to deal with that until time takes care of it for good. For example, you provide fallback content for modern tags in your markup and you play ISO media in FlashPlayer or QuickTime Player on PC's with IE6-IE8 or Firefox. You still have 100% support.
So there is no need for running native code in the browser.
Running anything other than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the browser is antiquated and impractical.
If you want to run native code, there are native windows for that.
Yeah, it is fucking ridiculous.
Windows is a tire fire of botnets and viruses. There are banks who give free iPads to their high value transaction customers so their money transfers don't end up in a malware author's account.
Charlie Miller, the guy who wins the Mac every year at pwn to own, recommends users buy Macs and refuse to install FlashPlayer if they want to be as safe as possible. Just the fact that Mac OS X no longer comes with FlashPlayer and Java reduces the attack surface.
I mean, just Unix and Software Update alone are better advantages than anything Windows has. It doesn't matter that Windows 7 has some tricks the Mac doesn't have when Windows 7 runs 80% of XP malware.
I have friends who take their Windows machine in twice a year to get malware cleaned off it. How can that possibly be safer than a platform that has no viruses?
And 90% of Mac users are using the latest version and receive patches automatically from Apple within a week. More than half of Windows users are on XP. It is pathetic.
> Apple is historically months
> behind in patching publicly
> disclosed vulnerabilities
> in core libraries they share
> with other Unix-like systems
First, we're talking about fucking Windows, not other Unix.
Apple is slower in deploying a patch than other Unix because it has to work for non-technical users, but then the patch goes out to 90% of the community within a week via their automatic Software Update system, and almost the entire 100% within a month. That removes the incentive to create a commercial exploit. There just aren't going to be enough users to exploit. On Windows, most machines are not up to date on their patches. It's results that matter — % of platform patched, value of exploits lowered — not just how fast you create a patch.
> Java
Mac OS X Lion does not ship with Java, and the Java that runs on it is made by Oracle.
Are you saying you recommend Windows over Mac to a non-technical user?
Even recommending another Unix to a Mac user is ridiculous, because they are not going to know how to patch it.
Really, the nerd-blindness in your comment is disheartening. Be practical.
I agree with your broader point about Yanks getting totally fucked over by corporations. I've lived in California, New York, Canada, and U.K. and the medical situation in the US is nothing short of a holocaust, with 40,000 killed per year. People here walk around sick like that is acceptable in a modern society. But even within this corporate propaganda bubble, 75% want universal health care. But the private health insurers paid off all the politicians, including President Obama, so it does not get done and people continue to suffer and die right next to doctor's offices and hospitals. It is just insane. There are movements here to privatize firefighters and cops it is like a bizarro Soviet Union, trying to kill itself with extremism.
However, the key point about work-related IP is not true in all states. In California, it is illegal for your employer to claim your IP from non-work endeavors. The states here are quasi-countries, there are tremendous differences between them. That is partly why the federal government always seems to be herding cats.
Yeah, but you get what you pay for. iOS developers make more money than Android developers, not less. Google does almost nothing for you. Apple does everything other than the actual development. And Apple offers you a larger user base in more countries and all with 1-click payment and install. And Apple is native C/C++/Objective-C development with Xcode and LLVM, not Java applets in a Dalvik engine that is going to be "impounded and destroyed" by a US court in the near future.
Please show me a field of endeavor where you keep 100% of the revenue. It doesn't exist. A 30% overhead for servers, credit card billing, deployment systems, etc. is very low. Apple also takes 30%, and you can see from their public financial records that they only keep 1/30th of that. So this is the split on Apple apps:
- developer 70%
- Apple-administered overhead 29%
- Apple 1%
That is great deal. Especially when the developer sets the retail price. Amazon used to keep 70% of eBooks before Apple came in with iBooks, where they keep 30%. And Amazon set the retail price also. In print publishing, the store keeps 75%. In music, if an artist gets 5% naw, that never happens.
In California, it is illegal for a company to claim ownership of ideas and work expressed in the employee's non-work hours. Not sure about Washington, but Microsoft calls the shots there in a big way. The US is not really one country, it is more equivalent to EU than to an individual European country. Some US states have the death penalty and some do not, for example.
However, in this case they would be submitting apps to Microsoft, so Microsoft would of course have to approve for them to be Windows Phone 7 developers. How grim to have 2 pointless Microsoft jobs, though.
I'm pretty sure Apple employees are excluded from App Store by default, but can get clearance from their boss to get their independent apps in. There are many App Store apps written independently by Apple employees.
You can tell a Mac to open programs and many other things by voice for well over 10 years now, and almost nobody uses it. You can tell an iPhone to make calls and many other things by voice for about 2 years now, and people use it only when forced, like when driving.
I think one reason this kind of thing is unpopular is it makes us realize how stupid computers are. Not even as smart as a small child. You have to construct your sentences even more carefully.
But I think the main reason it's unpopular is the computer is a brain enhancement prosthetic for our own brain, not another person's brain. It is a part of us. We don't want to hear the other half of our brain or our brain enhancement prosthetic talk to us.
However, I think we are willing to anthropomorphize some programs. For example, people do that with Google. That is a separate brain you call out to and ask a question.