Since that is the start of computing? We're talking about MS Office, which is a Mac app from the 1980's.
As far as the original point about the Mac versions of Office being second-class citizens, that was only true for the later parts of the 1990's. From 1985-1992, the Mac versions were the only versions, and during the 21st century, the Mac versions have been as good or better than the Windows versions. They're just different, in keeping with the fact that users buy MS Office on the Mac, not CTO's, and on the Mac, there is competition in office software.
But MS Office is a shitty app on any platform. The vast majority of users are better off with smaller, more-focused apps that are specific to what they are actually doing. MS Office is like a Swiss Army Knife with 1000 blades, it takes you so long to get out the right blade, you are better off just carrying a regular knife and a can opener and a screwdriver if that's what you need. And if your main thing is presentations, you should use Keynote. Period. Even if you have to buy a Mac or iPad just to do your presentations, they will pay for themselves immediately when your presentations get 100 times better with no extra effort on your part.
I do freelance creative work and it is extremely frustrating that everywhere I go where there is an I-T department they give me a Windows XP computer that can't do anything reliably except fail. I always have a Mac, iPad, and iPhone in my bag which I use to get work done. The person sitting next to me where I'm working now, who is also a freelancer, uses her own Ubuntu notebook and an iPhone to get work done. Both of us are seen as miracle workers by our boss who is on the other coast and can't see that we don't use any of the tools they issued us. This company has a whole floor of I-T people patching their Windows systems, yet we 2 freelancers are more productive with what we have on us. We were asked to sign up for Windows 7 training and we just laughed our asses off.
When I see an I-T person with Windows, I just know that person will not help me be more productive. That is not even on their radar. They won't know the company business, they just know when support for a particular Microsoft product is ending and what replaces it, and how to brush off user complaints that this is just another Microsoft remix with no helpful features that will cost them time and effort with no reward.
Apple will put LightPeak in all their products and leave everything else out, setting off a wave of LightPeak accessories. Nobody else has PC customers who are willing to pay for something new, or the ability to release hardware and software support simultaneously, or a line of 100 million consumer products with just one wired port. Apple is already using 10v (like LightPeak) in their USB, and iPad requires it.
I know many Slashdotters have backgrounds in the PC industry, which does not have a history of respecting standards but rather prefers ad hoc monopolies, but audio video has been ISO-standardized for 20 years in consumer electronics and H.264 is part of the latest generation of that and it is already 8 years old itself. It is your responsibility if you publish video to publish in the ISO/IEC standard. The PC industry is being absorbed by CE, but H.264 is not some interloping monopolist, it's a real honest-to-goodness vendor-neutral open standard.
Are you telling me an iPhone isn't radical? A desktop Web browser with a display 1/4 the pixels of the original Web browser and 1/8th the size, no mouse, no keyboard, no windows (the document floats inside the viewport), and holistic zooming is not radical? Yes, it is radical, but it is also usable.
With Wave, Google got blinded by how pretty it is under the hood and forgot to design a user interface. Wave should have looked like Microsoft Word v5.1, it should have shown the user "replace your Word, Email, and Content Management System publishing workflow with me." Have you seen how a company puts up a typical Web page? Word documents going around in email, eventually being pasted into a CMS, it is a joke. If MS Office didn't suck it would have had Wave-like features by now and no CMS would be needed by Office users.
Google needs humility. People think Apple is arrogant because they are great, but the truth is, they are great because they are humble. They did only one phone, and it took them 4-5 years to do it, working away totally in secret, iterating and testing and innovating. If Google was not so impressed with whatever they poop out, they would actually finish projects and make usable and successful products.
Even in ads, why did Apple have to do iAds? Why didn't Google offer ads that don't look like shit, ads that take advantage of HTML5?
How has Search improved in the past 5 years? How has it been made easier for the 90% of users who do not know how to use all the options like -term and site:foo.com and will never know that?
There already are FlashPlayer type add-ons made for Firefox to support h264:
- Adobe FlashPlayer plug-in v9.0.115 or later - Apple QuickTime Player plug-in v7 or later
That is how you have been watching H.264 in Firefox for years now. H.264 is not new. The only new thing is video playback moving from plug-ins to native in the browser. This caused Mozilla to rouse from its video coma and notice something new was happening other than JPEG images (1994).
> Not only that, but Mozilla can't afford to license h264.
Yes, they can. They are refusing to do so for religious reasons. They have failed to understand that the Web has changed from being PC-centric to being CE-centric (Consumer Electronics) therefore you have to support actual ISO standards like in CE, not monopolistic de facto standards as on the PC. The irony is, as noted above, the CE standard for video is MPEG-4 H.264, but the PC standard is also MPEG-4 H.264, just wrapped in a proprietary FlashPlayer instance to close it down! So the argument Mozilla is making is that H.264 is not open enough for us, so we're going to keep playing H.264 in closed FlashPlayer. It makes no sense. Their second argument is to close their eyes and pretend MPEG-4 never happened, to pretend that online video is new instead of 10 years old, and pretend that Ogg or WebM will have any impact at all.
> all agree to an open format (like WebM
We all agreed to an open format for a multimedia container in 1998. It's called MPEG-4. It's based on Apple QuickTime for the same reason that HTML5 is based on HTML4, so that it's easy for existing content and associated technologies to be updated. And since 1998, everyone involved in video has done just that, and today, support for MPEG-4 is universal in video capture, editing, and playback devices. You are not, I repeat *not* going to convince content creators or the makers of content creation tools to convert their MPEG-4 into something else that is untested and unproven and not standardized. Not only would that take 10 years but there is no guarantee it will work. This is not the PC where we make shit up as we go along to support whatever the current monopoly is.
We all agreed to an open format for video codec in 2003, it's called AVC and was standardized by ISO as H.264. Support for H.264 is also universal today in video capture, editing, and playback. It's in the hardware of every post-DVD video player, including smartphones, and all the video cameras and still cameras, including smartphones. It's even in PC GPU's. You're not going to change that without a time machine, and we're so far into it that the patents will expire before anything else arrives to take its place.
WebM and VP-8 are not open formats, they are Google formats. They are not vendor-neutral, Google has an advantage over everyone else. They are not standardized, so they will not be used by anyone with any investment in video. They have no protection from patent liability. You, I, or any manufacturer of video players or tools or creator or producer or consumer of video content can be sued for using WebM or VP-8 and Google is not going to help us in any way. Confusion over video standards simply drives everyone to YouTube as de facto video standard, which is exactly what Google intends with WebM. You have to be a Google fanboy to think otherwise. YouTube is the one and only entity that is essentially codec-agnostic because they have a huge back-end where they transcode everything into multiple formats before offering it for playback. A smartphone cannot do that, a video camera cannot do that, a video editing workstation cannot do that.
The complaint about MPEG-4 from some quarters is it has a patent pool. But the patent pool is a feature because it removes all patent liabilities from all MPEG-4 users. Only the patent pool can be sued, not the users. For the few people who have to pay for it (basically, Apple and anyone engaged in selling video as in iTunes or making video tools as in Final Cut Pro like Apple) it is a bar
This very likely doesn't apply to SATA, which is very application agnostic, but the idea of a better digital cable improving digital audio quality is not quite as ridiculous as it sounds.
Audio is a real-time application. Once you've started playing the audio, the player needs to get the bits for the next second before the next second arrives. So you don't always have time to ask for the data again if it arrives full of errors over a crappy cable. Instead, the player will simply guess what the missing bits should be, which lowers the audio quality. In other words, timeliness is prioritized over data integrity because as harmful as guessing the missing bits is to audio quality, stalling is much, much worse.
Again, SATA doesn't know it's sending audio, and the audio player on the other end doesn't get to fix any SATA errors, so I very much doubt a claim that you should buy Super SATA cables to improve your audio quality. But there are direct digital audio connections where you very much have to make sure your cables are of very, very high quality. That has been a sticking point for the adoption of those connections, actually. And it's certainly not true that because a connection is digital you can use some shitty low-end, no-name cable and it's just as good as a quality, name-brand cable. Bad analog cables introduce analog errors, and bad digital cables introduce digital errors, and there are always consequences, whether you can detect them immediately or not.
Running something other than HTML5 in the browser is over. If you're investing in something other than HTML5, make it iOS because it has a large installed base, extremely high quality, easy monetization, and a long future.
> And HTML 5 enables users to play video right in a Web browser instead > of requiring a plug-in, as Flash does. But predicting Flash's demise > is short-sighted
Never mind the demise of Flash, consider the demise of Web browser plug-ins. They were always supposed to be an optional element in a Web page because they're not universal, but Macromedia/Adobe and Flash developers abused that. Now, plug-ins are totally and completely impractical. You can't expect people to update their phone's Flash plug-in 5 times a year. The security implications of that alone are ridiculous. But the multiple platform implications are worse: Flash barely even runs on ARM yet, 3 years after the Web jumped firmly onto ARM with both feet.
> "Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time > to get HTML 5 video as awesome."
This actually makes me want to find the guy that said this and force him to compare Flash on a netbook to HTML5 on an iPad. The iPad has much less CPU power, yet the video runs smoothly at high qualities and is a much, much better experience. Flash has always been a pig, it has never been optimized. Nobody every describes the Flash video experience as "awesome" that is ridiculous. However the video experience on iPad has been lauded in every possible way. The guy has no idea what he is talking about.
> The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other > mobile device platforms.
Flash has been beginning to show up for some years now. HTML5 has been on all mobile platforms that are currently under active development for 2-3 years now. All of those devices have built-in hardware video players, equivalent to a next-generation DVD player that uses the Internet or solid-state storage instead of an optical disc. Most of the Web's video no longer requires Flash. Even if you see it in Flash on your PC, it's running as HTML5 on iPad and other mobiles. Even where it is still Flash-only, there is already an upgrade path in place because the underlying platform is adding HTML5.
> 2. Flash is used for more than just video delivery on the Web.
Over 90% of Flash applications are video players. Most of the rest can be redone in HTML5. The 1-2% that cannot do not justify the installation of a proprietary software layer with questionable security on billions of devices. Those apps can be redone as native apps, or exist as PC-only apps until technologies like WebGL are further advanced.
> Flash as a video solution was popularized with the rise of YouTube
In 2005... but by 2007, YouTube was running directly on mobiles and set-top boxes and iPods and other consumer electronics gear in native H.264.
> and [Flash] is also used by Hulu
Flash-based Hulu is not licensed for and does not run on mobiles, even if they have Flash. The Hulu that runs on mobiles is H.264. Hulu runs on iPad and iPhone right now, even though they don't have Flash. Hulu is actually a poster child for Flash not being required.
> [YouTube and Hulu] -- the top two video sites on the Web
Neither of which requires Flash. Both of which run better without it.
> Everybody is talking about video, but what doesn't necessarily get talked > about is a lot of the interactive elements
That is true of both Flash and HTML5. HTML5 also has much, much more interactivity than previous HTML specifications.
> Adobe provides strong tools and support for designers and developers.
Duh. Adobe has been killing themselves and their apps with Flash. CS4 had Flash in its user interface, but notice that in CS5 *by popular demand* the user has a preference to show the panels with Flash or with WebKit (HTML5!) so even in Adobe's apps Flash is being replaced by HTML5.
But Adobe support is irrelevant. Of course Adobe supports its proprietary platform! But that platform requires *all* other platform vendors to be Adobe partners and
- Google says "don't use user names to protect your privacy, use your real name as your user name" - Google says "there are times when you need to throw away your user name to protect your privacy" - Google says "yeah, that means you throw away your real name and invent a user name that you use as a real name going forward"
Wow that is fucking stupid.
All he's saying is "use your real name as a user name, and later, use your user name as your real name."
Did he think about the practical implications of this at all? If this were happening right now, over 50% of people aged 22 would be named either "Gaga" or "Jolie" or "Pitt."
Questions:
- is the Social Security administration and Internal Revenue Service and their equivalents in every country really going to throw away your old name? - is your college going to issue your degree in the name of "Rock Beavereater" after you did all your classes as "Fred Jones?" - are you going to throw away your friends, too, or is there going to be some way to inform your entire contact list that your name has changed from "Doris Grimley" to "Kristi Kardashian" without it being ridiculously easy to figure out that Kristi Kardashian is actually Doris Grimley for the rest of your life? - are you going to get your parents and family to throw away their names, too? Or is it always going to be easy to figure out that "Rick Astley, Jr." used to be named "Howard Smith, Jr." since his father is named "Howard Smith?"
If you needed any more evidence that Google "doesn't get the social" then here it is.
What's he going to do, get another IT job and offend again? They should have given him community service. The guy's career has already been wrecked.
We are way too much about jail in California and the US. You shouldn't go to jail unless you are violent, or an incorrigible repeat offender. California is bankrupting itself putting taxpayers in jail for crimes like these and for smoking, it is fucking crazy.
Innovation is when you make all the existing products in a category obsolete in some way, when you change the expectations for a product category so profoundly that all the products that follow you have to adopt key features of the innovative product.
For example, before iPad, tablets were Wintel with stylus. Since iPad, tablets are considered to have to have fingers not stylus as the pointer, and to have to have a mobile chip, not a desktop chip, and a mobile interface, not a desktop interface. Look at Ballmer getting raked over by the press recently, who simply could not believe he was pushing tablets with Windows NT on them. We hear PC makers saying they will make them only to stay in Microsoft's good graces, but they are also going to make mobile tablets, too.
Further, what we call a "mobile interface" today and a "desktop interface" doesn't make sense before iPhone, when phones had what we would now call "desktop interfaces." Palm and Windows Mobile were killed by the innovations in iPhone, Android was completely changed by those innovations even before it was released, and BlackBerry was also just recently completely changed by those innovations. Nokia stock is in the toilet because they have failed to adopt those innovations in any real way. The trackball and trackpad on the last few years of BlackBerry looks like a hand-crank on an automobile. I was looking at a friend's 2009 BlackBerry and I tried to touch the screen. It didn't occur to me that you had to use the trackpad.
Before iPhone, a "mobile browser" was WAP/WML, and there was a separate "mobile Web" which Tim Berners-Lee was unhappy with and said was not part of the Web, which is fundamentally device-independent. After iPhone, a "mobile browser" is HTML5, and it runs the same HTML/CSS/JavaScript pages that desktop browsers run. After iPhone, a smartphone is considered to have to have a desktop-class browser, audio video, 3D accelerated graphics, touch interface, and an application store.
> It is only the startups that don't have an existing investment to threaten that will take the real risks.
The reason Apple also does this also is because they have hardly any products. They basically just have a few markets they work in: high-end PC's, music players, phones, mobile PC's. They don't have an existing investment to protect because their products are always being made generic by cloners. A 2010 Mac is an entirely different device than a 2000 Mac: different operating system, different CPU architecture, different firmware, different API and 3rd party application platform. The only thing they have in common is they are both high-end PC's called "Mac." A 2010 Mac cannot even run a single Mac app from 2005. They used something like 6 different display connectors during the 21st century. Compare iPod touch from 2007 with the original iPod from 2001, they have nothing in common: different user interface, different operating system, different storage technology. The only thing they have in common is they are both pocket media players called "iPod." They are absolutely merciless about killing old technology. The vast majority of their users are running the most-current version of iOS or Mac OS right now, it's not really practical to run an old one because the platforms are moving so fast and old stuff is being killed so quickly.
Compare to a Windows PC, it is still using BIOS from 1982, which is why they can't access 3TB hard disks. Most users are still running the 2001 operating system. Microsoft was not even able to obsolete their own previous products, let alone any competitor.
Technology is moving so fast now, if you don't cannibalize yourself, somebody else will eat you alive. Apple knows this fundamentally, that is why they are the world's biggest startup.
>..And a lot of the reason that Android users don't spend a ton of money on apps are threefold.
Your 3 reasons are ridiculous.
> A) Android has a lot of really good free apps and it has lite apps that don't suck.
Although a higher percentage of Android apps are free than iOS apps, there are twice as many free apps on iOS, because there are so many more apps. And there are many, many great free apps.
> B) Most people who use Android aren't the type of people who spend lots and lots of money on needless things.
If you don't need apps, why did you buy a smartphone? Why not just buy a free feature phone or use 2 tin cans and string? That's just pure rationalization.
> C) With no restrictions on app development, the person who makes a $.99 fart application loses business > to the teenager with an hour of free time and an SDK who makes his own one and releases it for free for > his own amusement. With the iPhone that app might cost $50 or more to develop.
Again with the fart apps! The reality is, iOS apps are native C apps, not baby Java apps, so they are much, much more sophisticated and powerful than Android apps. iOS has multitrack audio recorders, video editors, sophisticated art tools, thousands of photography tools, and tens of thousands of full-size apps, including many world class productivity apps that were ported from the Mac like Keynote and OmniFocus and iMovie. iOS apps are desktop class apps. Android copied the iPhone user interface, but they left in the 2005-style Java phone apps. Deriding iOS apps as being all fart apps just makes you look ignorant and biased to people who have actually used App Store. I've written hundreds of songs on iOS, any time, day or night, instant-on, 32-64 GB of storage, 10 hour batteries, using a $10 iPhone app and more recently a $40 iPad app that I would gladly pay again for but don't have to. They replaced a $400 multitracker I used to carry with me that was the size of 3-4 iPhones.
iOS apps are *cheaper* to develop than Android apps, because the tools are built for rapid app development, there is a very high-level framework that does a ton of work for you. That is why there are apps on Mac OS and iOS done by 1-person teams that would be a 10-person or more team on other platforms. These are the same developer tools that (non-programmer) Tim Berners-Lee used to write WorldWideWeb in 1990. Cheap, easy development is a hallmark of iOS apps. And there is an iPhone and iPad simulator in the free developer tools, you can get an iPod touch for $199 no contract required, and if you want to do broad hardware testing there are only 3 different displays and 3 different SoC's.
The one and only reason there is no money in Android app development is that there is RAMPANT BOOTLEGGING. You don't have to pay for an Android app, you can easily get it for free.
Here is the key point to understand:
- the easiest way to get a paid iOS app is to click "INSTALL" in App Store - the easiest way to get a paid Android app is to bootleg it
For months now, we've been hearing about how iPad was going to get its ass kicked in the holiday season of 2010. Look out Apple! Now that's changed to early 2011, not just here but also in HP's recent leak. I'm looking forward to hearing the iPad competitors are coming mid-2011, and then holiday season 2011, and so on. Such a familiar story. iPod touch is 3 years old and no competitor except Zune HD for 1 year and it did not even sell 1 million.
Young people need to make YouTube videos and other media tasks that are a chore on Windows. The Mac has subsystems for pro audio, pro video, it has world class typography, graphics, it has Unix which makes it suitable for Web development, and it's reliable.
Windows is a joke. It's like a kind of jigsaw puzzle you play with endlessly because there are pieces missing. I won't hire freelancers who uses Windows because they will send me shoddy work in bizarre formats and who knows if there is a virus in there. They're just not worth the trouble. What does it say about you if you didn't have enough sense to get a Mac by now?
Apple announced earlier today that they already have a fix and it will roll out soon. It takes about 2 weeks to update half the platform, and another month to get most of the rest.
The first thing I do when I edit an article or manuscript is run a find/replace to find 2 spaces and replace with 1. Same as every other editor. So your spaces are all wasted work.
In the past it was correct to use 2 spaces when typing fixed-width type, and it was wrong when typing proportional type. Today, 2 spaces is always wrong because we don't use typewriters. Today, you just write semantically, not for presentation, because we have infinite varieties of presentation, your writing will certainly not always be published in fixed-width type. In other words, put in good data (a complete sentence followed by a space and then another complete sentence) and leave out bad data (extra spaces.)
> typewriter
There is your problem. Note that the year starts with a "2". There are these things called computers. They are garbage-in-garbage-out. 2 spaces after a sentence is garbage that someone will have to clean up.
Fossil fuels get ridiculous subsidies, and the cars cover our cities and the insides of our lungs with soot, and give kids asthma. And then there are the oil wars. And the oil spills. So no wonder the people (the government) want to subsidize the beginnings of a way out of this fucking mess. I know it's a kind of blasphemy to suggest that the people would get their way, or the status quo might change, or we might do something good and positive.
I don't even fucking drive, and I pay taxes for the oil wars, the oil spills, and I breathe the fucking stink of cars all day long. Weird that I would want people to start driving cars that don't spit out cancer causing lung pollution, huh? Must be a plot to help the rich.
> Apple has historically been very slow in patching exploits.
Bullshit. That is just not true. Java is a bad example because it's 3rd party software, not system software. The reality is that every Apple device gets a new kernel every few months, and a number of security patches per year.
Apple may take a little longer than others to release a patch for an issue that say, exists on all Unix, because they do extra testing due to the fact that they have consumer and creative users. Most Macs don't have an I-T person managing them, the patch absolutely has to work. But because of the Mac OS Software Update system and iTunes managing the mobiles, they roll out patches to the entire community much, much faster than anyone else. Out-of-date Apple software is dead and buried fast on Apple's systems.
Compare Android v2.2 deployment to iOS v4 deployment. Android v2.2 shipped one month earlier, yet Android v2.2 is on 1-2% of Android phones, while iOS v4 is on well over 50% of iPhones. Even the v4.0.1 which is 10 days old is on 25% already. And these are very regular consumer users. The iOS release comes through the same pipe as their movie rentals and is as easy to put on the phone.
Before you knock Apple's security or patching, consider they have had 3 years with no iOS malware at all, and almost 10 years with no Mac OS X viruses or botnets, and only 3 non-commercial malware which don't even run on the latest major OS release and which affected almost no users. So consider that they must be doing something right when all other PC's are crippled with malware and viruses routinely, and Android has commercial malware, even getting served out of Android Market. The majority of Windows PC's are 2 major versions out of date (9 years) and the majority of Android phones are 1 major version out of date (1 year). They are standing still while malware authors take aim.
They are by no means forcibly updated, they are just automatically updated. The imperative to update is that the whole community updates quickly and if you stay behind, new 3rd party software is harder to use. For example, if you are on iOS v2 right now (which almost nobody is), there are many apps you can't install until you update. So 77% of Macs are running the latest Mac OS, and even though iOS v4 is only a month old, it's already on a higher percentage of iPhones than Android v2. By September or so, it will be hard to find an iPhone running iOS v3. So Apple platforms are a moving target.
Everything is a computer now or soon will be. Not everyone is a computer scientist or soon will be. Therefore, computers have to be secured by the manufacturer, not by the user.
This is consumer computing, not kit sales. Android phones are sold to consumers. There is no excuse for the manufacturer not patching them. Any comparison that is similar to Windows is not a defense, it's an indictment. Consumers did not choose Windows... PC makers did.
What the fuck does iPhone have to do with this? Absolutely nothing.
You don't have to sneak anything into Android Market. The apps aren't audited, and apps can be installed from other sources as well. And since there is so little money in it, the incentive to put on a black hat is large. This is all 180 degrees opposite to iPhone. Completely different.
First of all, get a Mac as a workstation if you are a non-techie. Use any Unix on servers. Use no Windows or Microsoft products. This is by far the best advice you will ever get. If you ignore it now you will regret it later when you finally find out I was right.
Don't learn "programming" because that is too broad. Don't pick a language to learn intending to program in some other language later. Very few people can do that, and typically they are the ones who were programming at 13. It is a fascinating discipline all on its own, but I recommend you be very practical if you are a latecomer.
Instead, learn the kind of coding that goes with whatever you are actually interested in, and learn and use even basic programming skills to enhance your work in that field. For example, a graphic artist can work on one photo at a time in Photoshop, but if they learn AppleScript, they can write a 20 line AppleScript workflow that can make Photoshop process thousands of photos an hour unattended, and then he or she gets to be the boss of the other graphic artists. Other programming languages are not as valuable in graphic arts and other creative fields. In some businesses, Java is huge, in others, being able to make an iPhone app is huge. In marketing and communications and many other fields, being able to make Web code can be advantageous, for websites and email campaigns. Go where your existing knowledge takes you, and program there and drink everybody else's milkshake.
There are already plenty of programmers. What is missing are non-programmers who can do enough programming to be dangerous in their own field so they can solve everyday problems. The guy who created the World Wide Web was a physicist who wanted to solve the problem of scientists sharing documents with each other for peer review. He was not necessarily the best programmer in the world, but his knowledge of the problem he was solving made him the best person to solve that problem with programming.
If you learn Web code, learn the DOM (Document Object Model), not the languages. Learn what UTF-8 is and use no other character encodings. Learn how to build a DOM by marking up a document with semantic HTML, learn how to modify that DOM by styling it with CSS, and then learn how to rewrite that DOM programmatically with JavaScript. Don't get the huge thick JavaScript book and learn everything about JavaScript; get "DOM Scripting" by Jeremy Keith and learn the parts of JavaScript that relate to the DOM, which is a much smaller and much more useful task. Everything in Web development revolves around the DOM. After that, if you continue, learn basic Apache configuration. Apache is built-into your Mac, and is already running, so it is not hard to learn to make it do tricks. After that, learn a server language, probably PHP, so you can cause Apache to create pages on the server on the fly, and collect the information from forms and other common tasks. PHP and many other server languages such as Perl and Python and Ruby are built-into your Mac, ready to run, you just have to turn them on. For an editor, use TextWrangler which is free and is the lite version of BBEdit until you optionally buy BBEdit or find something you like better but you probably won't. Use the very cheap Acorn for graphics until you optionally upgrade to Photoshop and Illustrator. Use iMovie which is included in your Mac for video, and the cheap QuickTime Player Pro for encoding. Use GarageBand which included in your Mac for audio. Use the cheap Transmit for interacting with remote Web servers. Adhere to standards such as W3C HTML5 and ISO MPEG-4 at all times. Test in Safari and Firefox. Use browser-specific hacks that are made by experts -- such as the one that makes Firefox handle standard audio video -- don't put hacks in your own code. Write as little code as possible, make it readable.
If you don't like the above paragraph, don't get into Web coding. Just learn to use SquareSpace. Also a marketable skill.
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> I was measuring from when Windows 95 came out.
Since that is the start of computing? We're talking about MS Office, which is a Mac app from the 1980's.
As far as the original point about the Mac versions of Office being second-class citizens, that was only true for the later parts of the 1990's. From 1985-1992, the Mac versions were the only versions, and during the 21st century, the Mac versions have been as good or better than the Windows versions. They're just different, in keeping with the fact that users buy MS Office on the Mac, not CTO's, and on the Mac, there is competition in office software.
But MS Office is a shitty app on any platform. The vast majority of users are better off with smaller, more-focused apps that are specific to what they are actually doing. MS Office is like a Swiss Army Knife with 1000 blades, it takes you so long to get out the right blade, you are better off just carrying a regular knife and a can opener and a screwdriver if that's what you need. And if your main thing is presentations, you should use Keynote. Period. Even if you have to buy a Mac or iPad just to do your presentations, they will pay for themselves immediately when your presentations get 100 times better with no extra effort on your part.
I do freelance creative work and it is extremely frustrating that everywhere I go where there is an I-T department they give me a Windows XP computer that can't do anything reliably except fail. I always have a Mac, iPad, and iPhone in my bag which I use to get work done. The person sitting next to me where I'm working now, who is also a freelancer, uses her own Ubuntu notebook and an iPhone to get work done. Both of us are seen as miracle workers by our boss who is on the other coast and can't see that we don't use any of the tools they issued us. This company has a whole floor of I-T people patching their Windows systems, yet we 2 freelancers are more productive with what we have on us. We were asked to sign up for Windows 7 training and we just laughed our asses off.
When I see an I-T person with Windows, I just know that person will not help me be more productive. That is not even on their radar. They won't know the company business, they just know when support for a particular Microsoft product is ending and what replaces it, and how to brush off user complaints that this is just another Microsoft remix with no helpful features that will cost them time and effort with no reward.
Apple will put LightPeak in all their products and leave everything else out, setting off a wave of LightPeak accessories. Nobody else has PC customers who are willing to pay for something new, or the ability to release hardware and software support simultaneously, or a line of 100 million consumer products with just one wired port. Apple is already using 10v (like LightPeak) in their USB, and iPad requires it.
I know many Slashdotters have backgrounds in the PC industry, which does not have a history of respecting standards but rather prefers ad hoc monopolies, but audio video has been ISO-standardized for 20 years in consumer electronics and H.264 is part of the latest generation of that and it is already 8 years old itself. It is your responsibility if you publish video to publish in the ISO/IEC standard. The PC industry is being absorbed by CE, but H.264 is not some interloping monopolist, it's a real honest-to-goodness vendor-neutral open standard.
Are you telling me an iPhone isn't radical? A desktop Web browser with a display 1/4 the pixels of the original Web browser and 1/8th the size, no mouse, no keyboard, no windows (the document floats inside the viewport), and holistic zooming is not radical? Yes, it is radical, but it is also usable.
With Wave, Google got blinded by how pretty it is under the hood and forgot to design a user interface. Wave should have looked like Microsoft Word v5.1, it should have shown the user "replace your Word, Email, and Content Management System publishing workflow with me." Have you seen how a company puts up a typical Web page? Word documents going around in email, eventually being pasted into a CMS, it is a joke. If MS Office didn't suck it would have had Wave-like features by now and no CMS would be needed by Office users.
Google needs humility. People think Apple is arrogant because they are great, but the truth is, they are great because they are humble. They did only one phone, and it took them 4-5 years to do it, working away totally in secret, iterating and testing and innovating. If Google was not so impressed with whatever they poop out, they would actually finish projects and make usable and successful products.
Even in ads, why did Apple have to do iAds? Why didn't Google offer ads that don't look like shit, ads that take advantage of HTML5?
How has Search improved in the past 5 years? How has it been made easier for the 90% of users who do not know how to use all the options like -term and site:foo.com and will never know that?
So call a failure a failure. Wave is a failure.
There already are FlashPlayer type add-ons made for Firefox to support h264:
- Adobe FlashPlayer plug-in v9.0.115 or later
- Apple QuickTime Player plug-in v7 or later
That is how you have been watching H.264 in Firefox for years now. H.264 is not new. The only new thing is video playback moving from plug-ins to native in the browser. This caused Mozilla to rouse from its video coma and notice something new was happening other than JPEG images (1994).
> Not only that, but Mozilla can't afford to license h264.
Yes, they can. They are refusing to do so for religious reasons. They have failed to understand that the Web has changed from being PC-centric to being CE-centric (Consumer Electronics) therefore you have to support actual ISO standards like in CE, not monopolistic de facto standards as on the PC. The irony is, as noted above, the CE standard for video is MPEG-4 H.264, but the PC standard is also MPEG-4 H.264, just wrapped in a proprietary FlashPlayer instance to close it down! So the argument Mozilla is making is that H.264 is not open enough for us, so we're going to keep playing H.264 in closed FlashPlayer. It makes no sense. Their second argument is to close their eyes and pretend MPEG-4 never happened, to pretend that online video is new instead of 10 years old, and pretend that Ogg or WebM will have any impact at all.
> all agree to an open format (like WebM
We all agreed to an open format for a multimedia container in 1998. It's called MPEG-4. It's based on Apple QuickTime for the same reason that HTML5 is based on HTML4, so that it's easy for existing content and associated technologies to be updated. And since 1998, everyone involved in video has done just that, and today, support for MPEG-4 is universal in video capture, editing, and playback devices. You are not, I repeat *not* going to convince content creators or the makers of content creation tools to convert their MPEG-4 into something else that is untested and unproven and not standardized. Not only would that take 10 years but there is no guarantee it will work. This is not the PC where we make shit up as we go along to support whatever the current monopoly is.
We all agreed to an open format for video codec in 2003, it's called AVC and was standardized by ISO as H.264. Support for H.264 is also universal today in video capture, editing, and playback. It's in the hardware of every post-DVD video player, including smartphones, and all the video cameras and still cameras, including smartphones. It's even in PC GPU's. You're not going to change that without a time machine, and we're so far into it that the patents will expire before anything else arrives to take its place.
WebM and VP-8 are not open formats, they are Google formats. They are not vendor-neutral, Google has an advantage over everyone else. They are not standardized, so they will not be used by anyone with any investment in video. They have no protection from patent liability. You, I, or any manufacturer of video players or tools or creator or producer or consumer of video content can be sued for using WebM or VP-8 and Google is not going to help us in any way. Confusion over video standards simply drives everyone to YouTube as de facto video standard, which is exactly what Google intends with WebM. You have to be a Google fanboy to think otherwise. YouTube is the one and only entity that is essentially codec-agnostic because they have a huge back-end where they transcode everything into multiple formats before offering it for playback. A smartphone cannot do that, a video camera cannot do that, a video editing workstation cannot do that.
The complaint about MPEG-4 from some quarters is it has a patent pool. But the patent pool is a feature because it removes all patent liabilities from all MPEG-4 users. Only the patent pool can be sued, not the users. For the few people who have to pay for it (basically, Apple and anyone engaged in selling video as in iTunes or making video tools as in Final Cut Pro like Apple) it is a bar
This very likely doesn't apply to SATA, which is very application agnostic, but the idea of a better digital cable improving digital audio quality is not quite as ridiculous as it sounds.
Audio is a real-time application. Once you've started playing the audio, the player needs to get the bits for the next second before the next second arrives. So you don't always have time to ask for the data again if it arrives full of errors over a crappy cable. Instead, the player will simply guess what the missing bits should be, which lowers the audio quality. In other words, timeliness is prioritized over data integrity because as harmful as guessing the missing bits is to audio quality, stalling is much, much worse.
Again, SATA doesn't know it's sending audio, and the audio player on the other end doesn't get to fix any SATA errors, so I very much doubt a claim that you should buy Super SATA cables to improve your audio quality. But there are direct digital audio connections where you very much have to make sure your cables are of very, very high quality. That has been a sticking point for the adoption of those connections, actually. And it's certainly not true that because a connection is digital you can use some shitty low-end, no-name cable and it's just as good as a quality, name-brand cable. Bad analog cables introduce analog errors, and bad digital cables introduce digital errors, and there are always consequences, whether you can detect them immediately or not.
Running something other than HTML5 in the browser is over. If you're investing in something other than HTML5, make it iOS because it has a large installed base, extremely high quality, easy monetization, and a long future.
> HTML 5
It's "HTML5".
> And HTML 5 enables users to play video right in a Web browser instead
> of requiring a plug-in, as Flash does. But predicting Flash's demise
> is short-sighted
Never mind the demise of Flash, consider the demise of Web browser plug-ins. They were always supposed to be an optional element in a Web page because they're not universal, but Macromedia/Adobe and Flash developers abused that. Now, plug-ins are totally and completely impractical. You can't expect people to update their phone's Flash plug-in 5 times a year. The security implications of that alone are ridiculous. But the multiple platform implications are worse: Flash barely even runs on ARM yet, 3 years after the Web jumped firmly onto ARM with both feet.
> "Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time
> to get HTML 5 video as awesome."
This actually makes me want to find the guy that said this and force him to compare Flash on a netbook to HTML5 on an iPad. The iPad has much less CPU power, yet the video runs smoothly at high qualities and is a much, much better experience. Flash has always been a pig, it has never been optimized. Nobody every describes the Flash video experience as "awesome" that is ridiculous. However the video experience on iPad has been lauded in every possible way. The guy has no idea what he is talking about.
> The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other
> mobile device platforms.
Flash has been beginning to show up for some years now. HTML5 has been on all mobile platforms that are currently under active development for 2-3 years now. All of those devices have built-in hardware video players, equivalent to a next-generation DVD player that uses the Internet or solid-state storage instead of an optical disc. Most of the Web's video no longer requires Flash. Even if you see it in Flash on your PC, it's running as HTML5 on iPad and other mobiles. Even where it is still Flash-only, there is already an upgrade path in place because the underlying platform is adding HTML5.
> 2. Flash is used for more than just video delivery on the Web.
Over 90% of Flash applications are video players. Most of the rest can be redone in HTML5. The 1-2% that cannot do not justify the installation of a proprietary software layer with questionable security on billions of devices. Those apps can be redone as native apps, or exist as PC-only apps until technologies like WebGL are further advanced.
> Flash as a video solution was popularized with the rise of YouTube
In 2005 ... but by 2007, YouTube was running directly on mobiles and set-top boxes and iPods and other consumer electronics gear in native H.264.
> and [Flash] is also used by Hulu
Flash-based Hulu is not licensed for and does not run on mobiles, even if they have Flash. The Hulu that runs on mobiles is H.264. Hulu runs on iPad and iPhone right now, even though they don't have Flash. Hulu is actually a poster child for Flash not being required.
> [YouTube and Hulu] -- the top two video sites on the Web
Neither of which requires Flash. Both of which run better without it.
> Everybody is talking about video, but what doesn't necessarily get talked
> about is a lot of the interactive elements
That is true of both Flash and HTML5. HTML5 also has much, much more interactivity than previous HTML specifications.
> Adobe provides strong tools and support for designers and developers.
Duh. Adobe has been killing themselves and their apps with Flash. CS4 had Flash in its user interface, but notice that in CS5 *by popular demand* the user has a preference to show the panels with Flash or with WebKit (HTML5!) so even in Adobe's apps Flash is being replaced by HTML5.
But Adobe support is irrelevant. Of course Adobe supports its proprietary platform! But that platform requires *all* other platform vendors to be Adobe partners and
So let me get this straight:
- Google says "don't use user names to protect your privacy, use your real name as your user name"
- Google says "there are times when you need to throw away your user name to protect your privacy"
- Google says "yeah, that means you throw away your real name and invent a user name that you use as a real name going forward"
Wow that is fucking stupid.
All he's saying is "use your real name as a user name, and later, use your user name as your real name."
Did he think about the practical implications of this at all? If this were happening right now, over 50% of people aged 22 would be named either "Gaga" or "Jolie" or "Pitt."
Questions:
- is the Social Security administration and Internal Revenue Service and their equivalents in every country really going to throw away your old name?
- is your college going to issue your degree in the name of "Rock Beavereater" after you did all your classes as "Fred Jones?"
- are you going to throw away your friends, too, or is there going to be some way to inform your entire contact list that your name has changed from "Doris Grimley" to "Kristi Kardashian" without it being ridiculously easy to figure out that Kristi Kardashian is actually Doris Grimley for the rest of your life?
- are you going to get your parents and family to throw away their names, too? Or is it always going to be easy to figure out that "Rick Astley, Jr." used to be named "Howard Smith, Jr." since his father is named "Howard Smith?"
If you needed any more evidence that Google "doesn't get the social" then here it is.
What's he going to do, get another IT job and offend again? They should have given him community service. The guy's career has already been wrecked.
We are way too much about jail in California and the US. You shouldn't go to jail unless you are violent, or an incorrigible repeat offender. California is bankrupting itself putting taxpayers in jail for crimes like these and for smoking, it is fucking crazy.
Innovation is when you make all the existing products in a category obsolete in some way, when you change the expectations for a product category so profoundly that all the products that follow you have to adopt key features of the innovative product.
For example, before iPad, tablets were Wintel with stylus. Since iPad, tablets are considered to have to have fingers not stylus as the pointer, and to have to have a mobile chip, not a desktop chip, and a mobile interface, not a desktop interface. Look at Ballmer getting raked over by the press recently, who simply could not believe he was pushing tablets with Windows NT on them. We hear PC makers saying they will make them only to stay in Microsoft's good graces, but they are also going to make mobile tablets, too.
Further, what we call a "mobile interface" today and a "desktop interface" doesn't make sense before iPhone, when phones had what we would now call "desktop interfaces." Palm and Windows Mobile were killed by the innovations in iPhone, Android was completely changed by those innovations even before it was released, and BlackBerry was also just recently completely changed by those innovations. Nokia stock is in the toilet because they have failed to adopt those innovations in any real way. The trackball and trackpad on the last few years of BlackBerry looks like a hand-crank on an automobile. I was looking at a friend's 2009 BlackBerry and I tried to touch the screen. It didn't occur to me that you had to use the trackpad.
Before iPhone, a "mobile browser" was WAP/WML, and there was a separate "mobile Web" which Tim Berners-Lee was unhappy with and said was not part of the Web, which is fundamentally device-independent. After iPhone, a "mobile browser" is HTML5, and it runs the same HTML/CSS/JavaScript pages that desktop browsers run. After iPhone, a smartphone is considered to have to have a desktop-class browser, audio video, 3D accelerated graphics, touch interface, and an application store.
> It is only the startups that don't have an existing investment to threaten that will take the real risks.
The reason Apple also does this also is because they have hardly any products. They basically just have a few markets they work in: high-end PC's, music players, phones, mobile PC's. They don't have an existing investment to protect because their products are always being made generic by cloners. A 2010 Mac is an entirely different device than a 2000 Mac: different operating system, different CPU architecture, different firmware, different API and 3rd party application platform. The only thing they have in common is they are both high-end PC's called "Mac." A 2010 Mac cannot even run a single Mac app from 2005. They used something like 6 different display connectors during the 21st century. Compare iPod touch from 2007 with the original iPod from 2001, they have nothing in common: different user interface, different operating system, different storage technology. The only thing they have in common is they are both pocket media players called "iPod." They are absolutely merciless about killing old technology. The vast majority of their users are running the most-current version of iOS or Mac OS right now, it's not really practical to run an old one because the platforms are moving so fast and old stuff is being killed so quickly.
Compare to a Windows PC, it is still using BIOS from 1982, which is why they can't access 3TB hard disks. Most users are still running the 2001 operating system. Microsoft was not even able to obsolete their own previous products, let alone any competitor.
Technology is moving so fast now, if you don't cannibalize yourself, somebody else will eat you alive. Apple knows this fundamentally, that is why they are the world's biggest startup.
> ..And a lot of the reason that Android users don't spend a ton of money on apps are threefold.
Your 3 reasons are ridiculous.
> A) Android has a lot of really good free apps and it has lite apps that don't suck.
Although a higher percentage of Android apps are free than iOS apps, there are twice as many free apps on iOS, because there are so many more apps. And there are many, many great free apps.
> B) Most people who use Android aren't the type of people who spend lots and lots of money on needless things.
If you don't need apps, why did you buy a smartphone? Why not just buy a free feature phone or use 2 tin cans and string? That's just pure rationalization.
> C) With no restrictions on app development, the person who makes a $.99 fart application loses business
> to the teenager with an hour of free time and an SDK who makes his own one and releases it for free for
> his own amusement. With the iPhone that app might cost $50 or more to develop.
Again with the fart apps! The reality is, iOS apps are native C apps, not baby Java apps, so they are much, much more sophisticated and powerful than Android apps. iOS has multitrack audio recorders, video editors, sophisticated art tools, thousands of photography tools, and tens of thousands of full-size apps, including many world class productivity apps that were ported from the Mac like Keynote and OmniFocus and iMovie. iOS apps are desktop class apps. Android copied the iPhone user interface, but they left in the 2005-style Java phone apps. Deriding iOS apps as being all fart apps just makes you look ignorant and biased to people who have actually used App Store. I've written hundreds of songs on iOS, any time, day or night, instant-on, 32-64 GB of storage, 10 hour batteries, using a $10 iPhone app and more recently a $40 iPad app that I would gladly pay again for but don't have to. They replaced a $400 multitracker I used to carry with me that was the size of 3-4 iPhones.
iOS apps are *cheaper* to develop than Android apps, because the tools are built for rapid app development, there is a very high-level framework that does a ton of work for you. That is why there are apps on Mac OS and iOS done by 1-person teams that would be a 10-person or more team on other platforms. These are the same developer tools that (non-programmer) Tim Berners-Lee used to write WorldWideWeb in 1990. Cheap, easy development is a hallmark of iOS apps. And there is an iPhone and iPad simulator in the free developer tools, you can get an iPod touch for $199 no contract required, and if you want to do broad hardware testing there are only 3 different displays and 3 different SoC's.
The one and only reason there is no money in Android app development is that there is RAMPANT BOOTLEGGING. You don't have to pay for an Android app, you can easily get it for free.
Here is the key point to understand:
- the easiest way to get a paid iOS app is to click "INSTALL" in App Store
- the easiest way to get a paid Android app is to bootleg it
People do what is easiest.
> By early 2011
For months now, we've been hearing about how iPad was going to get its ass kicked in the holiday season of 2010. Look out Apple! Now that's changed to early 2011, not just here but also in HP's recent leak. I'm looking forward to hearing the iPad competitors are coming mid-2011, and then holiday season 2011, and so on. Such a familiar story. iPod touch is 3 years old and no competitor except Zune HD for 1 year and it did not even sell 1 million.
Young people need to make YouTube videos and other media tasks that are a chore on Windows. The Mac has subsystems for pro audio, pro video, it has world class typography, graphics, it has Unix which makes it suitable for Web development, and it's reliable.
Windows is a joke. It's like a kind of jigsaw puzzle you play with endlessly because there are pieces missing. I won't hire freelancers who uses Windows because they will send me shoddy work in bizarre formats and who knows if there is a virus in there. They're just not worth the trouble. What does it say about you if you didn't have enough sense to get a Mac by now?
And Google wonders why nobody wants to join their social network? Schmidt makes Zuckerberg look good.
Apple announced earlier today that they already have a fix and it will roll out soon. It takes about 2 weeks to update half the platform, and another month to get most of the rest.
The first thing I do when I edit an article or manuscript is run a find/replace to find 2 spaces and replace with 1. Same as every other editor. So your spaces are all wasted work.
In the past it was correct to use 2 spaces when typing fixed-width type, and it was wrong when typing proportional type. Today, 2 spaces is always wrong because we don't use typewriters. Today, you just write semantically, not for presentation, because we have infinite varieties of presentation, your writing will certainly not always be published in fixed-width type. In other words, put in good data (a complete sentence followed by a space and then another complete sentence) and leave out bad data (extra spaces.)
> typewriter
There is your problem. Note that the year starts with a "2". There are these things called computers. They are garbage-in-garbage-out. 2 spaces after a sentence is garbage that someone will have to clean up.
Fossil fuels get ridiculous subsidies, and the cars cover our cities and the insides of our lungs with soot, and give kids asthma. And then there are the oil wars. And the oil spills. So no wonder the people (the government) want to subsidize the beginnings of a way out of this fucking mess. I know it's a kind of blasphemy to suggest that the people would get their way, or the status quo might change, or we might do something good and positive.
I don't even fucking drive, and I pay taxes for the oil wars, the oil spills, and I breathe the fucking stink of cars all day long. Weird that I would want people to start driving cars that don't spit out cancer causing lung pollution, huh? Must be a plot to help the rich.
> Apple has historically been very slow in patching exploits.
Bullshit. That is just not true. Java is a bad example because it's 3rd party software, not system software. The reality is that every Apple device gets a new kernel every few months, and a number of security patches per year.
Apple may take a little longer than others to release a patch for an issue that say, exists on all Unix, because they do extra testing due to the fact that they have consumer and creative users. Most Macs don't have an I-T person managing them, the patch absolutely has to work. But because of the Mac OS Software Update system and iTunes managing the mobiles, they roll out patches to the entire community much, much faster than anyone else. Out-of-date Apple software is dead and buried fast on Apple's systems.
Compare Android v2.2 deployment to iOS v4 deployment. Android v2.2 shipped one month earlier, yet Android v2.2 is on 1-2% of Android phones, while iOS v4 is on well over 50% of iPhones. Even the v4.0.1 which is 10 days old is on 25% already. And these are very regular consumer users. The iOS release comes through the same pipe as their movie rentals and is as easy to put on the phone.
Before you knock Apple's security or patching, consider they have had 3 years with no iOS malware at all, and almost 10 years with no Mac OS X viruses or botnets, and only 3 non-commercial malware which don't even run on the latest major OS release and which affected almost no users. So consider that they must be doing something right when all other PC's are crippled with malware and viruses routinely, and Android has commercial malware, even getting served out of Android Market. The majority of Windows PC's are 2 major versions out of date (9 years) and the majority of Android phones are 1 major version out of date (1 year). They are standing still while malware authors take aim.
They are by no means forcibly updated, they are just automatically updated. The imperative to update is that the whole community updates quickly and if you stay behind, new 3rd party software is harder to use. For example, if you are on iOS v2 right now (which almost nobody is), there are many apps you can't install until you update. So 77% of Macs are running the latest Mac OS, and even though iOS v4 is only a month old, it's already on a higher percentage of iPhones than Android v2. By September or so, it will be hard to find an iPhone running iOS v3. So Apple platforms are a moving target.
Everything is a computer now or soon will be. Not everyone is a computer scientist or soon will be. Therefore, computers have to be secured by the manufacturer, not by the user.
This is consumer computing, not kit sales. Android phones are sold to consumers. There is no excuse for the manufacturer not patching them. Any comparison that is similar to Windows is not a defense, it's an indictment. Consumers did not choose Windows ... PC makers did.
What the fuck does iPhone have to do with this? Absolutely nothing.
You don't have to sneak anything into Android Market. The apps aren't audited, and apps can be installed from other sources as well. And since there is so little money in it, the incentive to put on a black hat is large. This is all 180 degrees opposite to iPhone. Completely different.
First of all, get a Mac as a workstation if you are a non-techie. Use any Unix on servers. Use no Windows or Microsoft products. This is by far the best advice you will ever get. If you ignore it now you will regret it later when you finally find out I was right.
Don't learn "programming" because that is too broad. Don't pick a language to learn intending to program in some other language later. Very few people can do that, and typically they are the ones who were programming at 13. It is a fascinating discipline all on its own, but I recommend you be very practical if you are a latecomer.
Instead, learn the kind of coding that goes with whatever you are actually interested in, and learn and use even basic programming skills to enhance your work in that field. For example, a graphic artist can work on one photo at a time in Photoshop, but if they learn AppleScript, they can write a 20 line AppleScript workflow that can make Photoshop process thousands of photos an hour unattended, and then he or she gets to be the boss of the other graphic artists. Other programming languages are not as valuable in graphic arts and other creative fields. In some businesses, Java is huge, in others, being able to make an iPhone app is huge. In marketing and communications and many other fields, being able to make Web code can be advantageous, for websites and email campaigns. Go where your existing knowledge takes you, and program there and drink everybody else's milkshake.
There are already plenty of programmers. What is missing are non-programmers who can do enough programming to be dangerous in their own field so they can solve everyday problems. The guy who created the World Wide Web was a physicist who wanted to solve the problem of scientists sharing documents with each other for peer review. He was not necessarily the best programmer in the world, but his knowledge of the problem he was solving made him the best person to solve that problem with programming.
If you learn Web code, learn the DOM (Document Object Model), not the languages. Learn what UTF-8 is and use no other character encodings. Learn how to build a DOM by marking up a document with semantic HTML, learn how to modify that DOM by styling it with CSS, and then learn how to rewrite that DOM programmatically with JavaScript. Don't get the huge thick JavaScript book and learn everything about JavaScript; get "DOM Scripting" by Jeremy Keith and learn the parts of JavaScript that relate to the DOM, which is a much smaller and much more useful task. Everything in Web development revolves around the DOM. After that, if you continue, learn basic Apache configuration. Apache is built-into your Mac, and is already running, so it is not hard to learn to make it do tricks. After that, learn a server language, probably PHP, so you can cause Apache to create pages on the server on the fly, and collect the information from forms and other common tasks. PHP and many other server languages such as Perl and Python and Ruby are built-into your Mac, ready to run, you just have to turn them on. For an editor, use TextWrangler which is free and is the lite version of BBEdit until you optionally buy BBEdit or find something you like better but you probably won't. Use the very cheap Acorn for graphics until you optionally upgrade to Photoshop and Illustrator. Use iMovie which is included in your Mac for video, and the cheap QuickTime Player Pro for encoding. Use GarageBand which included in your Mac for audio. Use the cheap Transmit for interacting with remote Web servers. Adhere to standards such as W3C HTML5 and ISO MPEG-4 at all times. Test in Safari and Firefox. Use browser-specific hacks that are made by experts -- such as the one that makes Firefox handle standard audio video -- don't put hacks in your own code. Write as little code as possible, make it readable.
If you don't like the above paragraph, don't get into Web coding. Just learn to use SquareSpace. Also a marketable skill.
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