Oh, so customers asked for phones to be made entirely of highly breakable glass? Non-removable batteries? Indiscernible display resolution upgrades? Removing the headphone jack? No memory expansion option? Software behind a walled garden? No ability to install 3rd party OS? Massive amounts of telemetry? So thin it bends and breaks in your pocket? Proprietary physical connectors requiring dongles?
Some of these things are what make modern smartphones thin and attractive and easy to use. Others are things average users don't care much about. While many geeks are happy with durable bricks and lots of options for hacking, the average consume wants a sleek and stylish phone that's also a status symbol and fashion statement, while being simple and safe to use. They don't care about user replaceable batteries or SD card expansions. They certainly don't care about rooting their phones, and I guaranteed they have never considered replacing their OS.
Phones that are thin and beautiful constantly outsell phones which are bulkier, sturdier, less attractive, more expandable, user-serviceable, and so on. Did you notice how much flack Apple got for it's "ugly" iPhone case? That should tell you how important aesthetics are to people. No matter how you try to explain the design advantages of the "hump", it still looks ugly, and people hate it for that reason alone.
IMO, a significant part of the kerfuffle was caused by the misunderstanding of how he used "neurotic", which appeared to be intended as an academic, psychological description, but was instead simply seen as an insult to women (I took it that way myself until someone pointed out the context). As soon as I saw that phrase, I knew he'd be fired. It sort of reminds me of people who were fired for using the term "niggardly." The final nail in the coffin was that he dared point out that men and women were inherently and fundamentally different, which is obvious to many, but is deemed insensitive and politically incorrect to point out.
What's interesting to me is that many people like me could easily predict the resulting drama from this. Damore even pointed out in his manifesto that women tend to react more emotionally to situations, which is exactly what you don't want to tell someone who is prone to reacting emotionally because... well, they're likely to react emotionally to what you just said and become angry or defensive. Trying to counter emotion with logic is a fool's game that has almost no chance at success. Your best weapon is empathy, with logic employed very gently and gradually over time.
Ignored in all of this piling on of Damore's "attack" on women is the more positive attributes he mentioned which many of us also recognize and acknowledge. For example, women are often more competent in socialization skills, which is hugely important in coordinating and running team full of men who are often less than stellar at communicating effectively with others. I don't think it's a coincidence that HR is often staffed by women, and most of my team producers have been women as well. Both of those jobs require good communication and interpersonal skills.
Of course, people playing online games or watching videos online might disagree.
Videos, yes, if you want more than 1080p or more than one stream. Games, on the other hand, aren't typically very bandwidth-intensive. Low latency is far more important for most multiplayer gaming.
There are C macros and your can write all you want with them; OOP for example, can be emulated with just structs and pointers.
Except for destructors, which is necessary for RAII, provides a lot of the safety OOP in C++ provides.
Type safety is more or less a fallacy.
Type safety allows your compiler to perform a bunch of error-checking that dynamic types have to catch at runtime. I'm not saying one or the other is better in general, but for mission critical code, I know which one I'd rather have.
iPhones sold because of the app store? There were NO third-party apps at launch. That was something Apple hastily retrofitted in later, because people were demanding it.
The iPhone was successful because it had a well-designed full touchscreen, and it didn't look like it was designed by and for geeks.
For the same reason one might buy a Kindle, which is nice e-reader, but also happens to be a platform for buying Amazon e-books. The important distinction is that the platform tie-in is just *one* of the device features, not the only one.
Similarly, Amazon Echo is a general-purpose voice-control unit that can do or control a lot of other stuff. Buying things from Amazon is just one of its many functions.
If Amazon gets too obnoxious with pushing ads, you might see some consumer backlash. These sorts of devices are hardly "must have" items for a home, after all. At this point, I'd say they're more akin to entertainment or novelty gadgets, so I think Amazon should tread carefully here.
I suspect there may be a change in some laws as a result of this incident. A swatting "prank", IMO, should be reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, a felony charge.
The guys in last place tend to be the most accommodating. I'm going to take a guess that Microsoft's movie and show rental revenue is almost non-existent before Plex/Kodi was offered, so it's not like it really mattered.
And patents really aren't that expensive. About $25k over 3-4 years to get a patent
You have a very big-corporation view of "aren't that expensive." It's true that to substantial companies, $25K isn't much. But as a small developer, I could pay for a patent, or I could pay for union actors to voice my small game, or maybe even have a marketing budget. Which do you think I'm going to choose?
Given that Zynga is mostly a problem for small, little-known developers, it seems a little odd for you to simply throw them under the bus, given that you seem to believe we somehow need them to protect our software.
That makes no sense, unless you're part of Zynga's management team.
That's a pretty nasty insult to throw at an indie game dev.
The fact that Zynga can rip off indie titles AND the fact that they have tons of patents should speak FOR elimination of software patents, not against it. The world is not perfect or fair, but software patents only make it less so. Indie developers can't afford patent projection, nor should they have to do so.
And as an indie game developer myself, I believe there's a special place in hell for Zynga. What they do is beneath contempt, but is technically not illegal. And as much as I hate to say it, trying to prevent them from doing so goes down a slippery legal slope that I think would be devastating for the game industry. Could you imagine if the litigation nightmare if a company managed to "patent" the basic game mechanics of a simple first-person shooter? If no one could copy game ideas, Stardew Valley could not have taken inspiration from Harvest Moon.
I don't want to eliminate patents, but I'd be fine with eliminating certain categories of patents. Software patents, design patents, business method patents... all of these are overreaching beyond the original intent of protecting the rights of inventors.
Software can be copyrighted, designs are protected by trademarks. Business methods... well, MBAs who need a patent to stay competitive can go fuck themselves.
Xbox shot themselves in the foot this generation with *horrible* PR out of the gate, with the focus on DRM instead of games, and an arrogant attitude that pissed gamers off. On top of that, mandatory pairing with the Kinect was a colossal blunder. That being said, they still have the best online service, hands-down, and it's still a solid console for this generation. But I did wait for the Kinect-less version with the 1GB drive. No discs for me this generation.
I also bought a PS4 because I enjoy playing JRPGs, and they have some great exclusives like Horizon, Nier, Uncharted, etc. And at least Sony doesn't screw around with the UI every three months, like Microsoft seems to have a pathological need to do - apparently in an attempt to figure out how to devote even more of the home screen to advertising, or to push yet another non-gaming feature I don't give a crap about.
And each generation, I end up picking up a Nintendo console eventually almost solely for the Zelda game. Will probably pick one up before I go travelling this summer. Sort of handy that it will be portable.
I suspect the market will stay large enough to keep prices at commodity levels for some time to come. We're still probably talking about a potential market of hundreds of millions of PCs worldwide, just not every human on earth like the smartphone market. It's more likely that the number of PC manufacturers and sellers will shrink.
It's true that speeds aren't increasing nearly as fast as they used to, which reduces motivation to upgrade. However, for most typical use, even an older PC like mine is has more than enough power for day to day use. My primary development machine is eight years old, which is sort of astonishing to me. It feels just as snappy today as when it was brand new. Even if a new machine was five times faster, I can't imagine how it would make me significantly more productive. CPU speed or lack of memory is simply not getting in the way of my productivity, so I don't upgrade.
That being said, I certainly recognize that there are some specialized use cases (other than games, of course) where you can never have enough computing horsepower. One of my machines is a digital audio workstation, custom designed for music composition. That's one case where you can never have too much CPU speed, RAM, and disk space. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
You're forgetting a few other categories: gaming and creators. Smartphone or tablets really aren't a good substitute for these, as you really can't do equivalent things. The desktop PC is "dead" in the same way pickup trucks or full sized vans are "dead". Just because a typical consumer doesn't need one doesn't mean there isn't still a significant market, and a valid reason for that market to exist.
PC sales will bottom out as they find their niche (work, gaming, creators), and then stabilize. At the moment, we're seeing a massive slowdown in the PC market for three reasons. First, obviously, smartphones, tablets, and notebooks are the large-scale market consumer devices of choice these days. Second, the PC market is largely saturated. And third, even for those of us to need PCs, those PCs are actually lasting FAR longer than they used to now that we've hit a "fast enough" hardware threshold.
These idiot pharmaceutical companies are just going to bring massive government regulation down on their heads by pulling this shit for short-term gains.
How about this? Give the FDA the power to investigate cases of rampant profiteering due to any medical-related patents. If a company is found guilty of profiteering, all patents related to the case are invalidated. Patents are a grant by the government (and the people it represents) to protect original research, which we want to encourage. But when companies abuse that private-public contract, they should be punished accordingly by the loss of those patents.
Why screw with your chances for a part-time gig with your last employer or one of their clients?
Yes, this. I didn't retire, but I went indie. I also stayed on at my employer for many months, helping them to make a smooth transition, even going down to half-time for a while.
Leaving on good terms helped out, because a few years later, when money was running a bit thin, I did some contract work with them. Win-win, everybody was happy.
There's no reason for business transactions to be back-biting affairs. Done correctly, both parties benefit.
if you use amazon for picture storage or backups, i'd start backing that shit up **NOW**
The whole point of using a cloud service for backups is that it's just an offsite backup You obviously don't have to make another backup of it. Rather, you can just switch backup providers at any time. Automatic offsite backup is one of the clouds true killer apps, I think. The real danger is if people are foolish enough to store their one and only copy of important documents in a cloud service.
Anyhow, I don't think there's a danger of Amazon S3 or Glacier going away anytime soon. That would be a pretty massive industry bombshell if it ever happened.
The other day I was stunned when my automobile effortlessly transported me to and from the grocery store with no significant expended effort on my part.
Slashdot Mirror
4. Massive latency
5. ???
6. Bankruptcy.
Oh, so customers asked for phones to be made entirely of highly breakable glass? Non-removable batteries? Indiscernible display resolution upgrades? Removing the headphone jack? No memory expansion option? Software behind a walled garden? No ability to install 3rd party OS? Massive amounts of telemetry? So thin it bends and breaks in your pocket? Proprietary physical connectors requiring dongles?
Some of these things are what make modern smartphones thin and attractive and easy to use. Others are things average users don't care much about. While many geeks are happy with durable bricks and lots of options for hacking, the average consume wants a sleek and stylish phone that's also a status symbol and fashion statement, while being simple and safe to use. They don't care about user replaceable batteries or SD card expansions. They certainly don't care about rooting their phones, and I guaranteed they have never considered replacing their OS.
Phones that are thin and beautiful constantly outsell phones which are bulkier, sturdier, less attractive, more expandable, user-serviceable, and so on. Did you notice how much flack Apple got for it's "ugly" iPhone case? That should tell you how important aesthetics are to people. No matter how you try to explain the design advantages of the "hump", it still looks ugly, and people hate it for that reason alone.
Everyone but Slashdot users.
Seriously, go back and listen to tech reviewers gushing about how *thin and beautiful* any given new smartphone is.
IMO, a significant part of the kerfuffle was caused by the misunderstanding of how he used "neurotic", which appeared to be intended as an academic, psychological description, but was instead simply seen as an insult to women (I took it that way myself until someone pointed out the context). As soon as I saw that phrase, I knew he'd be fired. It sort of reminds me of people who were fired for using the term "niggardly." The final nail in the coffin was that he dared point out that men and women were inherently and fundamentally different, which is obvious to many, but is deemed insensitive and politically incorrect to point out.
What's interesting to me is that many people like me could easily predict the resulting drama from this. Damore even pointed out in his manifesto that women tend to react more emotionally to situations, which is exactly what you don't want to tell someone who is prone to reacting emotionally because... well, they're likely to react emotionally to what you just said and become angry or defensive. Trying to counter emotion with logic is a fool's game that has almost no chance at success. Your best weapon is empathy, with logic employed very gently and gradually over time.
Ignored in all of this piling on of Damore's "attack" on women is the more positive attributes he mentioned which many of us also recognize and acknowledge. For example, women are often more competent in socialization skills, which is hugely important in coordinating and running team full of men who are often less than stellar at communicating effectively with others. I don't think it's a coincidence that HR is often staffed by women, and most of my team producers have been women as well. Both of those jobs require good communication and interpersonal skills.
Of course, people playing online games or watching videos online might disagree.
Videos, yes, if you want more than 1080p or more than one stream. Games, on the other hand, aren't typically very bandwidth-intensive. Low latency is far more important for most multiplayer gaming.
There are C macros and your can write all you want with them; OOP for example, can be emulated with just structs and pointers.
Except for destructors, which is necessary for RAII, provides a lot of the safety OOP in C++ provides.
Type safety is more or less a fallacy.
Type safety allows your compiler to perform a bunch of error-checking that dynamic types have to catch at runtime. I'm not saying one or the other is better in general, but for mission critical code, I know which one I'd rather have.
iPhones sold because of the app store? There were NO third-party apps at launch. That was something Apple hastily retrofitted in later, because people were demanding it.
The iPhone was successful because it had a well-designed full touchscreen, and it didn't look like it was designed by and for geeks.
For the same reason one might buy a Kindle, which is nice e-reader, but also happens to be a platform for buying Amazon e-books. The important distinction is that the platform tie-in is just *one* of the device features, not the only one.
Similarly, Amazon Echo is a general-purpose voice-control unit that can do or control a lot of other stuff. Buying things from Amazon is just one of its many functions.
If Amazon gets too obnoxious with pushing ads, you might see some consumer backlash. These sorts of devices are hardly "must have" items for a home, after all. At this point, I'd say they're more akin to entertainment or novelty gadgets, so I think Amazon should tread carefully here.
I think it was implied "unless you sell the CD", not "unless you lose the CD".
I suspect there may be a change in some laws as a result of this incident. A swatting "prank", IMO, should be reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, a felony charge.
The guys in last place tend to be the most accommodating. I'm going to take a guess that Microsoft's movie and show rental revenue is almost non-existent before Plex/Kodi was offered, so it's not like it really mattered.
Perhaps it's simply clear to most people which one is an homage and which one is a simple cash grab.
And patents really aren't that expensive. About $25k over 3-4 years to get a patent
You have a very big-corporation view of "aren't that expensive." It's true that to substantial companies, $25K isn't much. But as a small developer, I could pay for a patent, or I could pay for union actors to voice my small game, or maybe even have a marketing budget. Which do you think I'm going to choose?
Given that Zynga is mostly a problem for small, little-known developers, it seems a little odd for you to simply throw them under the bus, given that you seem to believe we somehow need them to protect our software.
That makes no sense, unless you're part of Zynga's management team.
That's a pretty nasty insult to throw at an indie game dev.
The fact that Zynga can rip off indie titles AND the fact that they have tons of patents should speak FOR elimination of software patents, not against it. The world is not perfect or fair, but software patents only make it less so. Indie developers can't afford patent projection, nor should they have to do so.
And as an indie game developer myself, I believe there's a special place in hell for Zynga. What they do is beneath contempt, but is technically not illegal. And as much as I hate to say it, trying to prevent them from doing so goes down a slippery legal slope that I think would be devastating for the game industry. Could you imagine if the litigation nightmare if a company managed to "patent" the basic game mechanics of a simple first-person shooter? If no one could copy game ideas, Stardew Valley could not have taken inspiration from Harvest Moon.
I don't want to eliminate patents, but I'd be fine with eliminating certain categories of patents. Software patents, design patents, business method patents... all of these are overreaching beyond the original intent of protecting the rights of inventors.
Software can be copyrighted, designs are protected by trademarks. Business methods... well, MBAs who need a patent to stay competitive can go fuck themselves.
Meh... I just buy all three.
Xbox shot themselves in the foot this generation with *horrible* PR out of the gate, with the focus on DRM instead of games, and an arrogant attitude that pissed gamers off. On top of that, mandatory pairing with the Kinect was a colossal blunder. That being said, they still have the best online service, hands-down, and it's still a solid console for this generation. But I did wait for the Kinect-less version with the 1GB drive. No discs for me this generation.
I also bought a PS4 because I enjoy playing JRPGs, and they have some great exclusives like Horizon, Nier, Uncharted, etc. And at least Sony doesn't screw around with the UI every three months, like Microsoft seems to have a pathological need to do - apparently in an attempt to figure out how to devote even more of the home screen to advertising, or to push yet another non-gaming feature I don't give a crap about.
And each generation, I end up picking up a Nintendo console eventually almost solely for the Zelda game. Will probably pick one up before I go travelling this summer. Sort of handy that it will be portable.
I suspect the market will stay large enough to keep prices at commodity levels for some time to come. We're still probably talking about a potential market of hundreds of millions of PCs worldwide, just not every human on earth like the smartphone market. It's more likely that the number of PC manufacturers and sellers will shrink.
It's true that speeds aren't increasing nearly as fast as they used to, which reduces motivation to upgrade. However, for most typical use, even an older PC like mine is has more than enough power for day to day use. My primary development machine is eight years old, which is sort of astonishing to me. It feels just as snappy today as when it was brand new. Even if a new machine was five times faster, I can't imagine how it would make me significantly more productive. CPU speed or lack of memory is simply not getting in the way of my productivity, so I don't upgrade.
That being said, I certainly recognize that there are some specialized use cases (other than games, of course) where you can never have enough computing horsepower. One of my machines is a digital audio workstation, custom designed for music composition. That's one case where you can never have too much CPU speed, RAM, and disk space. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
You're forgetting a few other categories: gaming and creators. Smartphone or tablets really aren't a good substitute for these, as you really can't do equivalent things. The desktop PC is "dead" in the same way pickup trucks or full sized vans are "dead". Just because a typical consumer doesn't need one doesn't mean there isn't still a significant market, and a valid reason for that market to exist.
PC sales will bottom out as they find their niche (work, gaming, creators), and then stabilize. At the moment, we're seeing a massive slowdown in the PC market for three reasons. First, obviously, smartphones, tablets, and notebooks are the large-scale market consumer devices of choice these days. Second, the PC market is largely saturated. And third, even for those of us to need PCs, those PCs are actually lasting FAR longer than they used to now that we've hit a "fast enough" hardware threshold.
These idiot pharmaceutical companies are just going to bring massive government regulation down on their heads by pulling this shit for short-term gains.
How about this? Give the FDA the power to investigate cases of rampant profiteering due to any medical-related patents. If a company is found guilty of profiteering, all patents related to the case are invalidated. Patents are a grant by the government (and the people it represents) to protect original research, which we want to encourage. But when companies abuse that private-public contract, they should be punished accordingly by the loss of those patents.
The funny thing is I think kids ads are less harmful. I remember them fondly from when I was a kid...
The current generation of kids will have fond memories of watching their favorite YouTube Let's Play or Twitch videogame streams.
Why screw with your chances for a part-time gig with your last employer or one of their clients?
Yes, this. I didn't retire, but I went indie. I also stayed on at my employer for many months, helping them to make a smooth transition, even going down to half-time for a while.
Leaving on good terms helped out, because a few years later, when money was running a bit thin, I did some contract work with them. Win-win, everybody was happy.
There's no reason for business transactions to be back-biting affairs. Done correctly, both parties benefit.
if you use amazon for picture storage or backups, i'd start backing that shit up **NOW**
The whole point of using a cloud service for backups is that it's just an offsite backup You obviously don't have to make another backup of it. Rather, you can just switch backup providers at any time. Automatic offsite backup is one of the clouds true killer apps, I think. The real danger is if people are foolish enough to store their one and only copy of important documents in a cloud service.
Anyhow, I don't think there's a danger of Amazon S3 or Glacier going away anytime soon. That would be a pretty massive industry bombshell if it ever happened.
Luckily, even normal people are unlikely to be using Windows 10s, so it probably won't affect them either.
The other day I was stunned when my automobile effortlessly transported me to and from the grocery store with no significant expended effort on my part.