Some start-up's simple photo editor isn't going to drive down the price of Photoshop (anymore than GIMP or any of a hundred other free photo editors did on the PC).
Without NeoPaint, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, and other second-string image editors, Adobe likely wouldn't have made Photoshop Elements. Likewise, startups trying to compete with Final Cut Pro (to take your example) may encourage Apple to add features to iMovie.
You're speculating. Elements, and now Photoshop Express, are not designed to compete with other products, but to extend the brand to the masses. More brand awareness leads to more sales of Photoshop.
The point here is that speech can in fact be comparable, or an unacceptable incitement, to violence, and therefore can, should, and often is restricted under the US Constitution.
Wait, so a programmer who uses a polling loop instead of an event listener is blameless, but Flash is responsible for all of the CPU usage? Puhleez. Flash is just a tool, and can be very efficient when used properly.
High birth rate != overpopulation. The most overpopulated countries (China, India) have low birth rates, and due to their growing economies have high CO2 emissions, growing rapidly as they ramp up their economies.
This is nothing new. People have been stupid en masse for thousands of years, it's just now we have managed to invent tools to harm ourselves much more effectively. We nearly did ourselves in a few decades ago with nuclear weapons, and to prove our stupidity we still keep them around as a kind of very expensive monument to dumb. As to a worldwide plague, it's only a matter of time -- dense concentrations of people, crop monocultures, breeding better diseases by liberal use of antibacterials.... When it does happen, it will affect everyone without regard to their diplomas, and you can blame those who didn't bother doing something about it, which is 99.9% of the population.
Intelligence is not something you can breed out of humanity. If only high IQ people could make high IQ people, then we wouldn't have any high IQ people. So maybe the current crop of brainy people aren't really so smart as they think they are, and we ought to evolve a different kind of intelligence.
Each of these companies sets employee wages (at annual performance review time) by referring to a survey of all the other companies' wages. Their target is, strangely enough, the "average" wage. This is itself a kind of collusion to keep wages down, by pointing the finger at each other. Sorry! Can't pay you more than everyone else gets paid. But on the other hand, it makes economic sense. Everyone gets a fair wage, which for a software engineer is far more than you'd be making assembling cars, and companies don't in general pay more than they have to.
The wild card, of course, is options. Pick the right rocket, and all of these little issues about salary won't matter so much.
Risk averse is not the way to go. As they say, change is inevitable. I'm *cough* well over 40, and I jumped from a "safe" big company to a startup 6 months ago. A few months after I jumped, there was a reorg and my old project was exported. Yes, I saw it coming. It's happened 3 other times to me.
It's quite simple: big companies (including Google) operate according to profitability, and when that inevitably goes down, the saw comes out. When your project gets cut, or shipped overseas, it's a game of musical chairs. If you think you're completely "safe", and avoid taking risks to remain "safe", then one day you might find yourself without a chair.
The best defense is learning new skills all the time, and taking risks. Yeah, it might take some work. Get used to that. Oh yeah, and I turned down a position with Google.
Do not take this personally. You are someone doing a job. Yes, you think you should be paid fairly for that work, but the company will willingly pay you far less than you are worth, if you are willing. There are two ways to fix this: walk, or negotiate. Negotiating may end up forcing you out -- a lot depends on your attitude, and what are the actual intentions of the company. So if you have any interest in keeping the current job, make a plan B, which is figure out where you would go if the negotiation fails. Futhermore, interviewing elsewhere will let you know what you are actually worth on the open market. And who knows, you may find a job you like far better. Do not threaten. It's business.
Also, you say: "With budget cuts and layoffs..." Um, your company may be imploding. Why do you want to stay there? Look around. Believe me, you do not want to stick to a ship that is sinking. I've been there and it is not pretty.
Benchmark on html5 vs flash video? Right here. Conclusion? "... Flash is efficient on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration and less efficient where it can't."
Right at the end of that motherjones article is the clue as to why BP isn't containing the oil:
"They take these bags to a plant and separate out the sand so they can process the oil"
Oh, this saves them the effort of pumping the oil into a tanker and shipping it. You see they just hire some cheap labor to scrape it off the beach and then send it to the refinery. Much easier!
It isn't necessary to totally replace oil. Reducing consumption is the first step. US fuel economy requirements are really low, and several high efficiency cars available in Europe aren't on sale in the US yet. The last Humvee just rolled off the line, yay.
I bought a hybrid this year and I'm very interested in electric or plugin cars. If everyone on this list would cut their gasoline use by 25-50% or more, that'd save about a billion gallons of gas per year. That's 50 million barrels of oil. That's bigger than... uh, I wish I could say it was bigger than the gulf oil spill. Damn.
> Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
Since even Google Docs can import these formats, they must not be as closed and impenetrable as you seem to think they are. Not saying it wouldn't be easier if the formats were completely "open", but... ok let's pretend MSFT and ADBE go out of business tomorrow. Nobody'll be able to read those documents? I don't think so.
I'm not defending closed formats here. But I have text documents bitrotting on tapes whose hardware readers have very much expired.
Adobe is doing significant rewrites. Take a look at the upcoming 10.1 release. Under the hood, it's a huge set of changes.
It is in Adobe's economic interest to do so as they have a huge investment in the technology. They have competition in the form of Silverlight, HTML5, etc, and said open source.
One of those Javascript engines you speak of was contributed to open source by Adobe.
As politicians like to say, everyone is entitled to their opinion, just not their own facts.
"The rest of the world has always constantly complained about how buggy and slow Flash is. Even the HONEST "boosters" have freely admit to this problem. This is a problem that exists primarily because of the very proprietary nature of Flash."
Um, no. Being proprietary does not inherently make one slow or buggy, and being open-source does not make anyone faster or less buggy. If you believe so, I have a bridge to sell you.
Flash is "slow" if for any reason, because it is cross platform and tries to do a lot of things, including gaming, RIAs, and video, etc, and is immensely ambitious (trying to run on any number of phones as well as desktops), and yes has an aging code base. These are not problems inherent to proprietary software.
You may say that a rewrite from scratch might help, but then you'd also need an economic incentive to cause people to invest the time and effort to do so, and you'd also be opening all sorts of intellectual property issues, plus what about the tools necessary to support workflows, etc.
Merely complaining about the status quo, without suggestions, is not a good solution.
Several people have spoken about "linear" RGB. That's nice and gets rid of some small level of distortion introduced by the non-linearity. However, it only starts there. For example, the eye sees R, G, and B differently. It is more sensitive to green than red, and to red more than blue, but it's not even that simple as the equations in your eye's processor are much more complicated. Many algorithms that treat the three "equally" are going to change the perceptual mixture. One can use other color spaces, such as HSV, Yuv, xyY, etc. with different advantages and disadvantages
Sound makes a good analogy. When you play music through any given combination of source, amp and speakers, it sounds different. Sometimes we actually like a particular type of sonic "distortion". It's never exactly like the "original" live music, though.
Likewise, any graphics manipulation is "distorting" the original. In fact, when I take a digital image and run it through Lightroom, do a range expansion/equalization, and do a bunch of tweaks to make the image look good, I'm making much larger changes than those little scaling problems listed in the article. The point is, do you think the result looks good?
There's other important variables, such as what colors are next to other colors in the image, how long you look at the image, what else is around you, how tired you are, etc. There's no such thing as color fidelity, there's only approximations to it. Color is hard, and I mean, really hard. See Hunt, "The Reproduction of Colour", or any number of other fine texts to learn more.
Wehrmacht != Nazi. The Nazis were the political party in charge, and the Wermacht was the regular professional army. This is in no way to excuse the Wermacht, and many soldiers were Nazis, but we remind that the belt buckle of an ordinary soldier does not reflect the much more extreme values of the dictatorship, which imprisoned or executed many christian clergy for opposing the regime. The Nazis swept away anyone that opposed their power, and their religion was power.
It is to laugh. Developers are never given enough information about what it is they are supposed to deliver. You want a fast sort algorithm? I can do that in, say, less than a week. You want an award winning social networking web site that brings in millions of hits? Might take me, hmmm, a month or two? Maybe more. Oh, please remember to factor in testing and documentation time, people.
1) Comments have a cost ("When you update the code that the comment references, you usually have to update the comment as well")
Worst case, sure. But the future maintenance cost of having no comments, or wrong comments, is higher than the cost of no comments. For example, if you code to an interface, and the interface does not specify what it does, then you have to go look at how it's implemented, which takes a lot more time. You might then say, well if the interface is wrongly documented... but then you're begging the question. Interfaces are contracts, and contracts require precise definitions.
2) Comments make code less readable
Wrong comments make code less readable, sure. But take a simple example:
insertPositionalMarker(context);
Why does this routine get called? What happens if I change it? Contrast with:
// this fixes defect 12345, by ensuring list order validity:
insertPositionalMarker(list);
Woohoo, now I know why it's there, and if I later need to understand the context, I can easily back reference to the original bug, and if I feel the need to make changes, I can regress the defect.
3) There is no need to document something that is obvious, and documenting same is a bad idea.
Maybe, if you are a genius and know (or want to frequently review) every line of code. In the real world, however, we call other people's modules, and we use context sensitive editors that hint a range of possible calls, including overloads. Which one do you pick and why? Does the call have side effects? A concise description of the interface contract is imperative for productivity. Not having documentation requires asking them, or wading through their code. Either one is a waste of time.
The fourth one in the article, code must always be self documenting, is correct, but trivial. Some code constructs are not obvious or readable, because they are complicated -- e.g. written by a domain expert.
The original article is fine for simplistic code bases, but doesn't work in the real world of high productivity, large scale applications. Anyone who doesn't comment their code is trading a small amount of their time for a large amount of everyone else's, and that's not scalable or efficient. In fact, it's just rude.
Slashdot Mirror
Some start-up's simple photo editor isn't going to drive down the price of Photoshop (anymore than GIMP or any of a hundred other free photo editors did on the PC).
Without NeoPaint, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, and other second-string image editors, Adobe likely wouldn't have made Photoshop Elements. Likewise, startups trying to compete with Final Cut Pro (to take your example) may encourage Apple to add features to iMovie.
You're speculating. Elements, and now Photoshop Express, are not designed to compete with other products, but to extend the brand to the masses. More brand awareness leads to more sales of Photoshop.
FIRE! KILL ALL THE [insert unpopular group here]!
The point here is that speech can in fact be comparable, or an unacceptable incitement, to violence, and therefore can, should, and often is restricted under the US Constitution.
Wait, so a programmer who uses a polling loop instead of an event listener is blameless, but Flash is responsible for all of the CPU usage? Puhleez. Flash is just a tool, and can be very efficient when used properly.
High birth rate != overpopulation. The most overpopulated countries (China, India) have low birth rates, and due to their growing economies have high CO2 emissions, growing rapidly as they ramp up their economies.
This is nothing new. People have been stupid en masse for thousands of years, it's just now we have managed to invent tools to harm ourselves much more effectively. We nearly did ourselves in a few decades ago with nuclear weapons, and to prove our stupidity we still keep them around as a kind of very expensive monument to dumb. As to a worldwide plague, it's only a matter of time -- dense concentrations of people, crop monocultures, breeding better diseases by liberal use of antibacterials.... When it does happen, it will affect everyone without regard to their diplomas, and you can blame those who didn't bother doing something about it, which is 99.9% of the population.
Intelligence is not something you can breed out of humanity. If only high IQ people could make high IQ people, then we wouldn't have any high IQ people. So maybe the current crop of brainy people aren't really so smart as they think they are, and we ought to evolve a different kind of intelligence.
Each of these companies sets employee wages (at annual performance review time) by referring to a survey of all the other companies' wages. Their target is, strangely enough, the "average" wage. This is itself a kind of collusion to keep wages down, by pointing the finger at each other. Sorry! Can't pay you more than everyone else gets paid. But on the other hand, it makes economic sense. Everyone gets a fair wage, which for a software engineer is far more than you'd be making assembling cars, and companies don't in general pay more than they have to. The wild card, of course, is options. Pick the right rocket, and all of these little issues about salary won't matter so much.
while reminders to follow the accounts of people who have long since passed away continue to arrive
A follow reminder from a dead Twitter user would be just plain creepy.
Risk averse is not the way to go. As they say, change is inevitable. I'm *cough* well over 40, and I jumped from a "safe" big company to a startup 6 months ago. A few months after I jumped, there was a reorg and my old project was exported. Yes, I saw it coming. It's happened 3 other times to me.
It's quite simple: big companies (including Google) operate according to profitability, and when that inevitably goes down, the saw comes out. When your project gets cut, or shipped overseas, it's a game of musical chairs. If you think you're completely "safe", and avoid taking risks to remain "safe", then one day you might find yourself without a chair.
The best defense is learning new skills all the time, and taking risks. Yeah, it might take some work. Get used to that. Oh yeah, and I turned down a position with Google.
Do not take this personally. You are someone doing a job. Yes, you think you should be paid fairly for that work, but the company will willingly pay you far less than you are worth, if you are willing. There are two ways to fix this: walk, or negotiate. Negotiating may end up forcing you out -- a lot depends on your attitude, and what are the actual intentions of the company. So if you have any interest in keeping the current job, make a plan B, which is figure out where you would go if the negotiation fails. Futhermore, interviewing elsewhere will let you know what you are actually worth on the open market. And who knows, you may find a job you like far better. Do not threaten. It's business. Also, you say: "With budget cuts and layoffs..." Um, your company may be imploding. Why do you want to stay there? Look around. Believe me, you do not want to stick to a ship that is sinking. I've been there and it is not pretty.
And the alternative you proffer is... nothing.
Benchmark on html5 vs flash video? Right here. Conclusion? "... Flash is efficient on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration and less efficient where it can't."
Well I presume that it would mean the sterlization of the Gulf of Mexico and the poisoning of the South of the USA.
Not that this is an excuse for BP, but apparently we were already managing to do that before the spill... http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/
Right at the end of that motherjones article is the clue as to why BP isn't containing the oil: "They take these bags to a plant and separate out the sand so they can process the oil" Oh, this saves them the effort of pumping the oil into a tanker and shipping it. You see they just hire some cheap labor to scrape it off the beach and then send it to the refinery. Much easier!
It isn't necessary to totally replace oil. Reducing consumption is the first step. US fuel economy requirements are really low, and several high efficiency cars available in Europe aren't on sale in the US yet. The last Humvee just rolled off the line, yay. I bought a hybrid this year and I'm very interested in electric or plugin cars. If everyone on this list would cut their gasoline use by 25-50% or more, that'd save about a billion gallons of gas per year. That's 50 million barrels of oil. That's bigger than... uh, I wish I could say it was bigger than the gulf oil spill. Damn.
... just listen to some Britney Spears?
> Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
... ok let's pretend MSFT and ADBE go out of business tomorrow. Nobody'll be able to read those documents? I don't think so.
Since even Google Docs can import these formats, they must not be as closed and impenetrable as you seem to think they are. Not saying it wouldn't be easier if the formats were completely "open", but
I'm not defending closed formats here. But I have text documents bitrotting on tapes whose hardware readers have very much expired.
Flash is a problem because it is a vendor standard that doesn't need to compete to survive.
Um, no
It fails to take advantage of hardware acceleration when EVERY OTHER SOLUTION does.
Um, no.
Why am I defending Adobe? Actually, I'm not. I'm fighting laziness.
There's nothing closed and proprietary about the format. There already are open source groups rewriting it.
Adobe is doing significant rewrites. Take a look at the upcoming 10.1 release. Under the hood, it's a huge set of changes.
It is in Adobe's economic interest to do so as they have a huge investment in the technology. They have competition in the form of Silverlight, HTML5, etc, and said open source.
One of those Javascript engines you speak of was contributed to open source by Adobe.
As politicians like to say, everyone is entitled to their opinion, just not their own facts.
... and has incredibly sucky UI to boot.
"The rest of the world has always constantly complained about how buggy and slow Flash is. Even the HONEST "boosters" have freely admit to this problem. This is a problem that exists primarily because of the very proprietary nature of Flash."
Um, no. Being proprietary does not inherently make one slow or buggy, and being open-source does not make anyone faster or less buggy. If you believe so, I have a bridge to sell you.
Flash is "slow" if for any reason, because it is cross platform and tries to do a lot of things, including gaming, RIAs, and video, etc, and is immensely ambitious (trying to run on any number of phones as well as desktops), and yes has an aging code base. These are not problems inherent to proprietary software.
You may say that a rewrite from scratch might help, but then you'd also need an economic incentive to cause people to invest the time and effort to do so, and you'd also be opening all sorts of intellectual property issues, plus what about the tools necessary to support workflows, etc. Merely complaining about the status quo, without suggestions, is not a good solution.
The usual concept is "delta-E", which tries to approximate color distance, but how accurate it is depends on the color space you are calculating with. http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Delta_E:_The_Color_Difference
Several people have spoken about "linear" RGB. That's nice and gets rid of some small level of distortion introduced by the non-linearity. However, it only starts there. For example, the eye sees R, G, and B differently. It is more sensitive to green than red, and to red more than blue, but it's not even that simple as the equations in your eye's processor are much more complicated. Many algorithms that treat the three "equally" are going to change the perceptual mixture. One can use other color spaces, such as HSV, Yuv, xyY, etc. with different advantages and disadvantages
Sound makes a good analogy. When you play music through any given combination of source, amp and speakers, it sounds different. Sometimes we actually like a particular type of sonic "distortion". It's never exactly like the "original" live music, though.
Likewise, any graphics manipulation is "distorting" the original. In fact, when I take a digital image and run it through Lightroom, do a range expansion/equalization, and do a bunch of tweaks to make the image look good, I'm making much larger changes than those little scaling problems listed in the article. The point is, do you think the result looks good?
There's other important variables, such as what colors are next to other colors in the image, how long you look at the image, what else is around you, how tired you are, etc. There's no such thing as color fidelity, there's only approximations to it. Color is hard, and I mean, really hard. See Hunt, "The Reproduction of Colour", or any number of other fine texts to learn more.
Wehrmacht != Nazi. The Nazis were the political party in charge, and the Wermacht was the regular professional army. This is in no way to excuse the Wermacht, and many soldiers were Nazis, but we remind that the belt buckle of an ordinary soldier does not reflect the much more extreme values of the dictatorship, which imprisoned or executed many christian clergy for opposing the regime. The Nazis swept away anyone that opposed their power, and their religion was power.
It is to laugh. Developers are never given enough information about what it is they are supposed to deliver. You want a fast sort algorithm? I can do that in, say, less than a week. You want an award winning social networking web site that brings in millions of hits? Might take me, hmmm, a month or two? Maybe more. Oh, please remember to factor in testing and documentation time, people.
1) Comments have a cost ("When you update the code that the comment references, you usually have to update the comment as well")
// this fixes defect 12345, by ensuring list order validity:
Worst case, sure. But the future maintenance cost of having no comments, or wrong comments, is higher than the cost of no comments. For example, if you code to an interface, and the interface does not specify what it does, then you have to go look at how it's implemented, which takes a lot more time. You might then say, well if the interface is wrongly documented... but then you're begging the question. Interfaces are contracts, and contracts require precise definitions.
2) Comments make code less readable
Wrong comments make code less readable, sure. But take a simple example:
insertPositionalMarker(context);
Why does this routine get called? What happens if I change it? Contrast with:
insertPositionalMarker(list);
Woohoo, now I know why it's there, and if I later need to understand the context, I can easily back reference to the original bug, and if I feel the need to make changes, I can regress the defect.
3) There is no need to document something that is obvious, and documenting same is a bad idea.
Maybe, if you are a genius and know (or want to frequently review) every line of code. In the real world, however, we call other people's modules, and we use context sensitive editors that hint a range of possible calls, including overloads. Which one do you pick and why? Does the call have side effects? A concise description of the interface contract is imperative for productivity. Not having documentation requires asking them, or wading through their code. Either one is a waste of time.
The fourth one in the article, code must always be self documenting, is correct, but trivial. Some code constructs are not obvious or readable, because they are complicated -- e.g. written by a domain expert.
The original article is fine for simplistic code bases, but doesn't work in the real world of high productivity, large scale applications. Anyone who doesn't comment their code is trading a small amount of their time for a large amount of everyone else's, and that's not scalable or efficient. In fact, it's just rude.