Also, the fact that I think everyone is missing is that it's more than just having a "simple" language that drives adoption.
Java is not going to die when it has such fantastic libraries like Spring and Hibernate. I shudder to think of the implications of writing a real web application in Go. It should maybe be called, Go Reinvent the Fucking Wheel.
This key difference -- the massive Java "ecosystems" as it were -- is why I put more stock in Groovy/Grails and Scala than I do in languages like Ruby and Go.
My company develops software for the iPhone simply because it is profitable - orders of magnitude more profitable than apps for any other mobile platform.
Strategically, you don't want to be tied to one platform, but that's no different with iPhone than it is with Mac, Windows, Blackberry, et al.
The fact that it has a restrictive developer agreement and it's one-sided means that there is additional risk developing software for the platform, that's all. Risks are part of doing business, and lots of people have chosen to accept the relatively low risk of developing for the iPhone platform.
If you want to develop open-source software for Android that has no inherent risk of being rejected by the sole supplier, go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. Meanwhile, we're quite happy developing software for Apple's platform and dealing with the inherent risks of doing so.
Excellent point. You forgot some other things to remind the Netbook users to do:
Backup all data automatically
Figure out how to sync/share iTunes libraries
Figure out how to sync photos and contacts
Figure out Windows Update so your computer is not vulnerable to viruses
Figure out the right firewall settings
Organize all of my documents
Figure out how to buy application licenses (you mean I have to find the vendor's site, register for an account, and type in my credit card info for each app? How do I know they will protect my credit card data? Also, I have to PAY for an upgrade?)
Figure out how to keep all of their applications up to date
Figure out how to make Firefox zoom in and out to accommodate the small screen (good luck seeing the whole page)
I'm a software developer/architect, and even to me, all of the above things are really annoying. I can put up with them on my laptop and desktop PCs... the computers that are designed for power usage and long use cases (word processing, software development, graphic design).
But, for reading an e-book, playing a few games, and browsing the web? I really should not have to put up with that crap on a device that I use for 30 minutes at a time.
The "netbook experience" is basically just like using a shitty laptop. I can think of maybe one scenario where a netbook is superior to a laptop -- when you are travelling and you don't want the extra weight.
99% of the time, why would I not just use my good laptop (something with a decent screen size, graphics card, processor, and memory) instead?
The bottom line is, unlike a netbook, the iPad has many use cases where it is superior to a laptop.
SQL injection attacks are very easy to avoid, yes, if you know about them.
In my time, I have seen several instances of SQL injection-vulnerable code, and 99% of the time it comes from junior level developers, who obviously have had no security training.
Should the developer be liable, or the company that let them code without being trained?
Funny response, but unfortunately, iPhones and iPads are capable of other things, so your argument loses most of its luster.
Did you have the following sentiment when Microsoft Word for Windows was announced in 1989?
"So, for only $2000 (for the computer) + $500 (for the printer) + $500 (for the software) , you can use a typewriter electronically! You get a delete key, and you don't have to worry about where to put that $3000 in cash you would still have!"
I agree wholeheartedly. Substitute "laptop" for "iPad" and I think people would find their statements stupid.
"Why would anyone ever want to play Scrabble on a laptop? After all, that laptop costs over $1000, but I can get scrabble for $20!"
And yet, Scrabble on Facebook is one of the most popular games on the internet.
If you already have an iPhone and an iPad, the additional cost of Scrabble is very low. And Trivial Pursuit. And Risk. And Texas Hold 'Em. And Monopoly. And Fieldrunners. And the other 140,000 apps available.
Personally, I'm extremely excited about the possibilities here, and discounting them because of the cost of the iPad/iPhone is definitely missing the point.
The high price tag is probably the primary reason that he's not selling many of these things; I know plenty of devs that successfully sell simple games at the $1 level, and they are able to sell tons of them as long as the product is good (20 or 30 thousand is not unheard of, even if you're not a huge success). A couple hundred purchases means that you made some serious mistakes either in pricing or promotion.
I disagree. Now, I haven't released any games on the store, but I've released three different applications. On one of our apps, we raised the price to $6.99 from $0.99 since it was a niche product. We now are selling 1/2 as many as we were before, but the 7x increase in price more than makes up for the difference.
The key phrase you have is "as long as the product is good." The problem is that the App Store itself is no longer a viable marketing channel, since there is so much competition. You have to be in the top 50 of a category to get any traction. The indie devs are having difficulty getting noticed in all the clutter, and a "few hundred downloads" is about on par with what I am expecting for each app we release.
Maybe eventually we will release an app that catches fire, but I'm holding expectations at the few hundred mark for now.
Technical debt builds up, and having a bunch of ActiveX apps around means you are accruing a shitload of that debt each day. 5 years ago, when 95% of the world used Windows and IE, it was still a dumb idea to build an app that used ActiveX.
You actually want Best Buy to go out of business? You want thousands of teenagers, not to mention thousands of really smart people that work at HQ, out of work?
Wow.
It's not like they are forcing you to shop there or somehow lowering your quality of life. Some people actually enjoy shopping there. (I'm not a huge fan, personally, but I really don't enjoy watching American businesses crumble and thousands of normal people losing their jobs.)
4 gig cards are not that expensive and they hold an amazing amount of stuff. Probably 8 gig cards will be pretty standard in a year or two. So just get the largest cards you can afford and you won't need to have lots of extra ones lying around.
The downside to doing this is that you put all of your eggs in one basket. If that card is lost or fails before you back up the images, you will lose way too many photos. For a pro photographer, that is probably unacceptable risk.
For casual photographers, though, buying the biggest card you can does make sense.
You think that's cool? I think it's frightening and would be a ridiculous invasion of privacy.
Do you really want George W. Bush having access to your thoughts, even if it was just visual data? I can personally think of few worse things than that.
So yes, this is an interesting topic, but really the only plus on this paper was that they further refined the size of the black hole at the center of our galaxy (and of course they are assuming black holes exist).
Where is the revolutionary part of this paper? Anyone?
Safari: I dont own a mac. I dont care to own a mac. And I dont even want to pirate OSX for my very compatible Thinkpad-T61 to run it. And pretty much every software ported from OSX to Windows is bad, and I mean BAD.
iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari are all capable and useful software products for Windows. You may not like them, and they are not perfect, but calling them "BAD" is a bit ridiculous.
Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Konqueror) seem to me to be noticeably faster than FireFox and IE in rendering pages that I frequent. To me, render time and memory footprint are a very important criteria when choosing a browser. Safari and Chrome are great options for most Windows users.
Do yourself a favor and download Safari or Chrome and give them a try, especially since you used to use Konqueror. I think you might be surprised, even if you have to give up Greasemonkey and AdBlock.
Out of curiosity, what exactly are you trying to do that Hibernate isn't solving? Is it some database-level craziness with stored procedures or something?
Hibernate, while not perfect, meets the vast majority of my needs... and for the 0.1% of the time it doesn't, I can always write my own persistence layer.
Code re-use will make you look good when future requirements come up. For example, what happens when you decide to move to MySQL to get away from Oracle, and all of your code is using JDBC with hand-coded SQL? You'll be spending weeks changing that stuff when Hibernate would have abstracted away the vast majority of issues.
Ideally, the best way to avoid bugs is to code smartly and minimize lines of code. Re-using industry standard libraries and frameworks like Hibernate and Spring lets you do that.
Don't look now, but you are officially an author of the most concise and rational explanation of why the Republican party is in shambles.
The crazy thing is that McCain and Palin's "maverick" reputations still weren't enough to quell the insanity of the clowns that are in charge of that party. McCain's concession speech was indeed a beautiful thing, and you could see the "real" John McCain, freed from the irrational fear-mongering that the Republican party has been flinging at us for the past eight years.
Even though I voted Obama and am VERY glad he won, I think that's overly harsh on McCain. Every impression I got was that he was more intelligent and sane than the Texas Village Idiot.
Nice backhanded compliment!
The problem is that McCain and Palin ran on a platform that catered to the same uneducated religious nutjobs that Bush appealed to.
They were trying to get elected, and since it worked for Bush, they figured it was their best shot. Unfortunately, it seems that McCain sold out everything that he did over the past thirty years and listened to his Karl Rove-esque advisers too much. Every time I saw McCain speak over the last couple of months, I have come away with the feeling that he wasn't happy about what he was saying.
For example, in the debate, when he never looked at Obama... and in all of the slanderous and patently outright ridiculous TV advertisements and speeches... and even at the RNC when he made his acceptance speech... it just seemed like you are watching someone who doesn't like what he's been doing.
McCain's acceptance speech, when he was again freed from the confines of his (obviously terrible) campaign advisors, showed me the McCain of last year... the one who has honor and integrity and is not afraid to say what he thinks (most of the time).
Re:The LHC should be destroyed
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem here -- and you're a prime example -- is that most people have no idea what a black hole really is, and they're scared of it.
As others point out, these black holes form all the time in nature. And black holes do dissipate.
Most people only know black holes as the crazy huge things that eat light and stars and are "gateways to other dimensions". So, when they see the headline, "Large Hadron Collider Will Create Black Holes" they panic and try to stop it from happening.
It's just another example of the media feeding off of the public's ignorance and willingness to read an eye-catching headline.
How about we just stop using social security numbers as though they're some sort of magical security token?
No kidding. SSNs are everywhere, and this website is a great example.
Your analogy to the computer security world -- certificates and signatures -- is actually a good idea, although implementing it would cost billions of dollars to the government, banking, and insurance industries (among many others) that use SSNs to identify clients.
Do you really think that Mom & Pop Bank in rural North Dakota has any ability to modify their banking systems to work with such a scheme when they can't even make a web site? I don't.
ID Theft (or ID fraud) is always going to be a problem, but really, we are dealing with an antiquated system. Band aids such as credit monitoring are not good solutions and don't provide any reasonable modicum of security.
I realized it was her bra size + some other personality attributes. I decifered it and did a google search only to find some prom pictures that would make a porn star blush.
So, you did a Google search for something like "38DD 31337" and were surprised by the fact you found some lascivious pictures? Why even bother with the Google search?
It probably was so that you could find those pictures.:)
Also, "rare" is a relative term; if 1% of all planetary systems contain a habitable planet, there would be a lot of them and they'd be rather closely spaced.
Very true. Also, keep in mind that the chance of it being "habitable" is actually higher than most people might think. For example, our solar system has at least three strong possibilities for places that harbor or at one point harbored life: Earth, Mars, and Europa.
Of course, the real issue here is that even the distance to our nearest neighbor - Alpha Centauri - is insurmountable in the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
Java is not going to die when it has such fantastic libraries like Spring and Hibernate. I shudder to think of the implications of writing a real web application in Go. It should maybe be called, Go Reinvent the Fucking Wheel.
This key difference -- the massive Java "ecosystems" as it were -- is why I put more stock in Groovy/Grails and Scala than I do in languages like Ruby and Go.
Strategically, you don't want to be tied to one platform, but that's no different with iPhone than it is with Mac, Windows, Blackberry, et al.
The fact that it has a restrictive developer agreement and it's one-sided means that there is additional risk developing software for the platform, that's all. Risks are part of doing business, and lots of people have chosen to accept the relatively low risk of developing for the iPhone platform.
If you want to develop open-source software for Android that has no inherent risk of being rejected by the sole supplier, go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. Meanwhile, we're quite happy developing software for Apple's platform and dealing with the inherent risks of doing so.
I'm a software developer/architect, and even to me, all of the above things are really annoying. I can put up with them on my laptop and desktop PCs... the computers that are designed for power usage and long use cases (word processing, software development, graphic design).
But, for reading an e-book, playing a few games, and browsing the web? I really should not have to put up with that crap on a device that I use for 30 minutes at a time.
The "netbook experience" is basically just like using a shitty laptop. I can think of maybe one scenario where a netbook is superior to a laptop -- when you are travelling and you don't want the extra weight.
99% of the time, why would I not just use my good laptop (something with a decent screen size, graphics card, processor, and memory) instead?
The bottom line is, unlike a netbook, the iPad has many use cases where it is superior to a laptop.
In my time, I have seen several instances of SQL injection-vulnerable code, and 99% of the time it comes from junior level developers, who obviously have had no security training.
Should the developer be liable, or the company that let them code without being trained?
It's also funny reading it on a MacBook Pro.
Did you have the following sentiment when Microsoft Word for Windows was announced in 1989?
"So, for only $2000 (for the computer) + $500 (for the printer) + $500 (for the software) , you can use a typewriter electronically! You get a delete key, and you don't have to worry about where to put that $3000 in cash you would still have!"
"Why would anyone ever want to play Scrabble on a laptop? After all, that laptop costs over $1000, but I can get scrabble for $20!"
And yet, Scrabble on Facebook is one of the most popular games on the internet.
If you already have an iPhone and an iPad, the additional cost of Scrabble is very low. And Trivial Pursuit. And Risk. And Texas Hold 'Em. And Monopoly. And Fieldrunners. And the other 140,000 apps available.
Personally, I'm extremely excited about the possibilities here, and discounting them because of the cost of the iPad/iPhone is definitely missing the point.
The high price tag is probably the primary reason that he's not selling many of these things; I know plenty of devs that successfully sell simple games at the $1 level, and they are able to sell tons of them as long as the product is good (20 or 30 thousand is not unheard of, even if you're not a huge success). A couple hundred purchases means that you made some serious mistakes either in pricing or promotion.
I disagree. Now, I haven't released any games on the store, but I've released three different applications. On one of our apps, we raised the price to $6.99 from $0.99 since it was a niche product. We now are selling 1/2 as many as we were before, but the 7x increase in price more than makes up for the difference.
The key phrase you have is "as long as the product is good." The problem is that the App Store itself is no longer a viable marketing channel, since there is so much competition. You have to be in the top 50 of a category to get any traction. The indie devs are having difficulty getting noticed in all the clutter, and a "few hundred downloads" is about on par with what I am expecting for each app we release.
Maybe eventually we will release an app that catches fire, but I'm holding expectations at the few hundred mark for now.
Kill it, MS. Please!
You actually want Best Buy to go out of business? You want thousands of teenagers, not to mention thousands of really smart people that work at HQ, out of work? Wow. It's not like they are forcing you to shop there or somehow lowering your quality of life. Some people actually enjoy shopping there. (I'm not a huge fan, personally, but I really don't enjoy watching American businesses crumble and thousands of normal people losing their jobs.)
4 gig cards are not that expensive and they hold an amazing amount of stuff. Probably 8 gig cards will be pretty standard in a year or two. So just get the largest cards you can afford and you won't need to have lots of extra ones lying around.
The downside to doing this is that you put all of your eggs in one basket. If that card is lost or fails before you back up the images, you will lose way too many photos. For a pro photographer, that is probably unacceptable risk.
For casual photographers, though, buying the biggest card you can does make sense.
Noone demanded something like the iPhone.
That's not entirely true. I recall many blogs and other places asking for iPod functionality in a cellular phone, so they only needed one device.
The problem is, Motorola listened, and we ended up with the P.O.S. that was called 'ROKR'.
Apple knew the right way to execute on that promise, and delivered the iPhone.
Freedom isn't free.
Yes, you're absolutely right. Freedom costs $1.05.
Yeah, but that's the gift that keeps on giving all year!
You think that's cool? I think it's frightening and would be a ridiculous invasion of privacy.
Do you really want George W. Bush having access to your thoughts, even if it was just visual data? I can personally think of few worse things than that.
In fact, this paper is just corroborating what other people have already proven in this Astrophysical Journal paper from 2005.
So yes, this is an interesting topic, but really the only plus on this paper was that they further refined the size of the black hole at the center of our galaxy (and of course they are assuming black holes exist).
Where is the revolutionary part of this paper? Anyone?
Safari: I dont own a mac. I dont care to own a mac. And I dont even want to pirate OSX for my very compatible Thinkpad-T61 to run it. And pretty much every software ported from OSX to Windows is bad, and I mean BAD.
iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari are all capable and useful software products for Windows. You may not like them, and they are not perfect, but calling them "BAD" is a bit ridiculous.
Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Konqueror) seem to me to be noticeably faster than FireFox and IE in rendering pages that I frequent. To me, render time and memory footprint are a very important criteria when choosing a browser. Safari and Chrome are great options for most Windows users.
Do yourself a favor and download Safari or Chrome and give them a try, especially since you used to use Konqueror. I think you might be surprised, even if you have to give up Greasemonkey and AdBlock.
Out of curiosity, what exactly are you trying to do that Hibernate isn't solving? Is it some database-level craziness with stored procedures or something?
Hibernate, while not perfect, meets the vast majority of my needs... and for the 0.1% of the time it doesn't, I can always write my own persistence layer.
Code re-use will make you look good when future requirements come up. For example, what happens when you decide to move to MySQL to get away from Oracle, and all of your code is using JDBC with hand-coded SQL? You'll be spending weeks changing that stuff when Hibernate would have abstracted away the vast majority of issues.
Ideally, the best way to avoid bugs is to code smartly and minimize lines of code. Re-using industry standard libraries and frameworks like Hibernate and Spring lets you do that.
Don't look now, but you are officially an author of the most concise and rational explanation of why the Republican party is in shambles.
The crazy thing is that McCain and Palin's "maverick" reputations still weren't enough to quell the insanity of the clowns that are in charge of that party. McCain's concession speech was indeed a beautiful thing, and you could see the "real" John McCain, freed from the irrational fear-mongering that the Republican party has been flinging at us for the past eight years.
Even though I voted Obama and am VERY glad he won, I think that's overly harsh on McCain. Every impression I got was that he was more intelligent and sane than the Texas Village Idiot.
Nice backhanded compliment!
The problem is that McCain and Palin ran on a platform that catered to the same uneducated religious nutjobs that Bush appealed to.
They were trying to get elected, and since it worked for Bush, they figured it was their best shot. Unfortunately, it seems that McCain sold out everything that he did over the past thirty years and listened to his Karl Rove-esque advisers too much. Every time I saw McCain speak over the last couple of months, I have come away with the feeling that he wasn't happy about what he was saying.
For example, in the debate, when he never looked at Obama... and in all of the slanderous and patently outright ridiculous TV advertisements and speeches... and even at the RNC when he made his acceptance speech... it just seemed like you are watching someone who doesn't like what he's been doing.
McCain's acceptance speech, when he was again freed from the confines of his (obviously terrible) campaign advisors, showed me the McCain of last year... the one who has honor and integrity and is not afraid to say what he thinks (most of the time).
The problem here -- and you're a prime example -- is that most people have no idea what a black hole really is, and they're scared of it.
As others point out, these black holes form all the time in nature. And black holes do dissipate. Most people only know black holes as the crazy huge things that eat light and stars and are "gateways to other dimensions". So, when they see the headline, "Large Hadron Collider Will Create Black Holes" they panic and try to stop it from happening.
It's just another example of the media feeding off of the public's ignorance and willingness to read an eye-catching headline.
How about we just stop using social security numbers as though they're some sort of magical security token?
No kidding. SSNs are everywhere, and this website is a great example.
Your analogy to the computer security world -- certificates and signatures -- is actually a good idea, although implementing it would cost billions of dollars to the government, banking, and insurance industries (among many others) that use SSNs to identify clients.
Do you really think that Mom & Pop Bank in rural North Dakota has any ability to modify their banking systems to work with such a scheme when they can't even make a web site? I don't.
ID Theft (or ID fraud) is always going to be a problem, but really, we are dealing with an antiquated system. Band aids such as credit monitoring are not good solutions and don't provide any reasonable modicum of security.
And just think... you aren't even counting the problem with the non-atomic increment losing votes if multiple threads execute it at the same time!
The horror!
I realized it was her bra size + some other personality attributes. I decifered it and did a google search only to find some prom pictures that would make a porn star blush.
:)
So, you did a Google search for something like "38DD 31337" and were surprised by the fact you found some lascivious pictures? Why even bother with the Google search?
It probably was so that you could find those pictures.
Also, "rare" is a relative term; if 1% of all planetary systems contain a habitable planet, there would be a lot of them and they'd be rather closely spaced.
Very true. Also, keep in mind that the chance of it being "habitable" is actually higher than most people might think. For example, our solar system has at least three strong possibilities for places that harbor or at one point harbored life: Earth, Mars, and Europa.
Of course, the real issue here is that even the distance to our nearest neighbor - Alpha Centauri - is insurmountable in the foreseeable future.