On one hand, as a hyperintelligent super powerful alien, why would you bother introducing yourself to a bunch of mindless apes? If you have questions, just disguise yourself as a human, have a couple of chats, ingest a bit of our media, and whatever passing curiosity you'd have about us would be quickly satisfied.
On the other hand, you could just come down here, forcibly take a few humans for study. Who the hell cares about witnesses (which makes the whole shady-abduction-in-remote-forest thing seem stupid).
I personally think that such aliens, if they exist, do already know about us as well as most other aliens in the universe. And they don't really care, except for the ones that are on par. In that case, they probably greet each other with a yawn and move on.
My prediction is that the 720 will run Windows 8 metro apps. It makes sense for MS in all respects: it increases the audience, drawing developers. It gives Xbox a bigger software library out of the gate. It bolsters consumer confidence in metro.
If they can map Kinect input to what would normally be touchscreen gestures, it would effectively become a living room PC; perfect as Microsoft's stealth play into being just that.
If they can complete the picture by bringing their pretty weak Xbox Music and Video offerings, they might have both a strategic and sales win through 2014.
That is, if they can don't do boneheaded things like always-on DRM or releasing hardware that can fry an egg and gives you a double red ring of death.
Win8 bashing aside, I think there may be a new netbook revival coming. I actually think netbooks did a lot of cause these issues. People bought these $300 el cheapo WinXP / Win7 machines instead of shelling out $1000 for a quality machine. And they found that these things actually work pretty OK for what they are. So well that their expectations have adjusted - they'll shell out no more than $300-$400 for their new PC. This is after HP already cranked out tons of $799 el cheap PC's which set expectations low already.
Then Intel comes in with $1000+ Ultrabooks, proclaiming a new birth of PC's. That didn't work.
Which tells me that should Wintel produce a next generation of $350 netbooks, with touch and Bay Trail, perhaps some nicer design, they'd sell a lot of those. And this would be bad for Microsoft and its partners, because they really want you buying $1200+ PC's. A race to the bottom would be bad for the Wintel industry. But they'd sell.
My wife is one of these users. She bought this crappy Acer Aspire some 4 years ago. She refuses to buy a quality PC - she even refuses to buy a tablet! But now she's looking for a replacement *netbook*, and if one came out she'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Yada yada. Notebooks may become the new desktop, and Microsoft makes just as much off a notebook sale as a desktop sale. With Win8, Microsoft may even have some tablet play, supposing they successfully blur the lines. Microsoft will keep drawing much revenue from Windows and Office, struggle with cloud stuff, continue to sink money into Bing, keep a big consumer presence with Xbox 720, and slowly creep up to barely interesting market share with Windows Phone.
The industry will shift from time to time, and Microsoft will invest 1% of its huge war chest to gain a foothold into new things, never quite succeeding, but never quite losing their whole stack. They are like that poker player who won a huge stack early on, and 5 hours later still has the same stack. Others also have big stacks, and everyone keeps wondering when they'll lose it, and then they get frustrated and derisive when their stack actually keeps slowly growing.
When it comes down to it, people are going to buy what is kick ass in at least one area. The WiiU doesn't kick any ass. Here's the problem:
Game library: Doesn't kick ass, but then it never does with a new console. Hardware: Doesn't kick ass even when compared to current gen consoles. It's comparable to current consoles. It needs to not be comparable. Integration: Missed the ass by a foot. Doesn't bring anything new or amazing. New interactions and form factor: No asses have red marks. Release strategy: Owners of asses are pulling up their trousers out of boredom.
Wow, finally a phone with a readable screen. Those 300ppi screens were just killing my eyes. That 1080p screen totally makes my 1280x768 screen obsolete./s
I have a solution, but it involves simultaneous use of biological viruses and nukes. At a minimum, my solution will at least erase anyone's desire to care.
Many of you accuse Microsoft of understocking, and yet when it doesn't continue to sell a whole lot of units, you laugh at their sales? Maybe they just know roughly how many they expect to sell, and stock accordingly? That it sells out on the first day seems to draw unnecessary ire. You weren't really interested in buying it anyways, so why the hell do you care so much?
Really, it's almost as if many of you gain some kind of strange exhilaration from laughing at and faux outrage at Microsoft's missteps. Really, why? The only explanation I can think if is that you WANT to see Microsoft succeed - that many of you are secret Microsoft admirers who are left disappointed and needing an outlet to vent your frustration by mocking them.
Microsoft is doing an excellent job at ensuring their own mediocre results and their own gradual downfall. It really doesn't need you to mock them on the way down. That seems to be a byproduct of your own personality flaws.
Here's where a bunch of Apple apologists chime in to the effect of: "If you're trying to do that with your iPad, you're using it wrong."
I'm really tired of hearing that. The only things an Ultrabook can't do that an iPad can come down to apps that qualify as curiosities. I'd rather spring $200 more for an Ultrabook that can pretty much do anything, not just what iPad owners proclaim as important.
Which is why hybrids like the Yoga are actually a compelling idea, despite the execution needing some refinement.
I've posted on this before, but I am using an Acer W500 with Win8, and have found the experience to be surprisingly productive. At night, I lie around browsing tablet style, and it's pretty much on par with any iPad or Android tablet for most things. Win8 is still appallingly crappy in some areas (I'm looking at you, Windows Mail), but that's a software thing, not a design / hardware thing. In the morning, sometimes I work from home, and so I plug it into my 1080p 24" LCD, keyboard, mouse, and am happily opening terminals, browser windows, and other tools. The tablet screen acts as a second monitor - that's cool, too. My scanner, printer, camera, external DVD, and every USB peripheral I have work perfectly fine.
OS team: Good job, thanks for the speed improvements, retaining great hardware compatibility, and decent stability. UI team: Ha ha, you guys are funny. You're not fired. Apps team: You guys are not even funny, so you're fired.
A device can only be really good at one thing. This is not a new principle to design but pretty much the fucking foundation of industrial design.
You seem so sure of yourself, evident by the unnecessary profanity. And yet many highly successful products both past and present betray your assertion.
MP3 + Video player => iPod Touch and its ilk MP3 + Video player + Browser + Apps + Phone => smartphones Passenger car + SUV => Crossover SUV cars Game Console + Media Center => PS3, Xbox 360, soon PS4 and Xbox 4 PC + LCD monitor hybrids => All in one PC's, iMac Compact Camera + Interchangeable lens => Micro 4/3 (e.g. Sony NEX) Printer + Scanner + Fax => Printer / Scanner / Fax (duh) Radio + CD Player => Boombox, FM Walkman Power Screwdriver + Power Drill => Combo Power Screwdriver / Drill Hammer + Crowbar => Pretty much any hammer you find today
and the list goes on and on and on. Pretty much every one of these carries with it compromises that can be lambasted by anyone inclined to do so. In all successful cases, the benefits match or exceed the compromise. Some of these examples are more enduring than others, but the bottom line is that compromised hybrid designs are a fine way to go about product design.
I wouldn't want to stay in a coffee shop or library all day, either. Fortunately, where I *do* work, I have a 2560x1600 monitor and a nice ass keyboard and mouse.
I wouldn't want to work all day on a MacBook Air, either.
I found both the article and what JC wrote to be highly informative and rather validating of my approach to things. In software, we usually get little validation because of the wide variety of opinions of who we work with. We've all seen the extremes: The hard core C programmer who can't be bothered with any OO nonsense, and who advocates inspecting the assembly of every method you write. The C++ hippie who sees everything as some kind of exercise in getting the compiler to write the code for you.
I'm sure most of us follow a more balanced approach. C++ has to be about performance over anything else, otherwise there are plenty of other languages that accomplish much greater degrees of expression, but can't cash the performance check. But, expressibility is important, too, because performance goes out the door once we stop understanding what the code is doing. It's nice to have a language that lets you express things somewhat functionally, yet gives you the flexibility to wring out serious performance.
I think there are only 2 important aspects to code quality: performance and readability (I classify correctness under performance).
Both need a great deal of context to judge, and any judge will ultimately see what they want to see if they want to see it. It is impossible for a developer to judge without preconception. One developer working on highly parallel systems will, if they are predisposed to, gasp at your lack of use of parallelism. Another developer who lives and breathes C++ 11 will gasp that everything lacks move constructors and how your code could be refactored with lambdas.
I remember working in an audio group where I found a long algorithm to do a bit of sound processing. I gawked at how unwieldy it was, and proceeded to hotshot a new implementation that was 1/2 the number of lines. And then I was promptly reprimanded: the original code, ugly as it was, was that way because it was way more L2 cache friendly. I ended up setting the project back with my "less sucky" code. Doing a source diff history, I found a much shorter version as one of the initial versions.
The only rule when working in this industry is: Always be prepared to defend your decisions. If you can't, then either you deserve to be fired, or you're working in the wrong place.
Slashdot Mirror
On one hand, as a hyperintelligent super powerful alien, why would you bother introducing yourself to a bunch of mindless apes? If you have questions, just disguise yourself as a human, have a couple of chats, ingest a bit of our media, and whatever passing curiosity you'd have about us would be quickly satisfied.
On the other hand, you could just come down here, forcibly take a few humans for study. Who the hell cares about witnesses (which makes the whole shady-abduction-in-remote-forest thing seem stupid).
I personally think that such aliens, if they exist, do already know about us as well as most other aliens in the universe. And they don't really care, except for the ones that are on par. In that case, they probably greet each other with a yawn and move on.
Oops, "they can complete the picture by bringing their pretty weak Xbox Music and Video offerings" edit:
they can complete the picture by *vastly improving* their pretty weak Xbox Music and Video offerings ...
My prediction is that the 720 will run Windows 8 metro apps. It makes sense for MS in all respects: it increases the audience, drawing developers. It gives Xbox a bigger software library out of the gate. It bolsters consumer confidence in metro.
If they can map Kinect input to what would normally be touchscreen gestures, it would effectively become a living room PC; perfect as Microsoft's stealth play into being just that.
If they can complete the picture by bringing their pretty weak Xbox Music and Video offerings, they might have both a strategic and sales win through 2014.
That is, if they can don't do boneheaded things like always-on DRM or releasing hardware that can fry an egg and gives you a double red ring of death.
This sounds shockingly fast.
Win8 bashing aside, I think there may be a new netbook revival coming. I actually think netbooks did a lot of cause these issues. People bought these $300 el cheapo WinXP / Win7 machines instead of shelling out $1000 for a quality machine. And they found that these things actually work pretty OK for what they are. So well that their expectations have adjusted - they'll shell out no more than $300-$400 for their new PC. This is after HP already cranked out tons of $799 el cheap PC's which set expectations low already.
Then Intel comes in with $1000+ Ultrabooks, proclaiming a new birth of PC's. That didn't work.
Which tells me that should Wintel produce a next generation of $350 netbooks, with touch and Bay Trail, perhaps some nicer design, they'd sell a lot of those. And this would be bad for Microsoft and its partners, because they really want you buying $1200+ PC's. A race to the bottom would be bad for the Wintel industry. But they'd sell.
My wife is one of these users. She bought this crappy Acer Aspire some 4 years ago. She refuses to buy a quality PC - she even refuses to buy a tablet! But now she's looking for a replacement *netbook*, and if one came out she'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Plus, god forbid we leak radiation into space. Keep space black!!
I did the same calculation, and I came to the conclusion that the black hole would burn to a crisp as soon as it touches the astronaut.
Yada yada. Notebooks may become the new desktop, and Microsoft makes just as much off a notebook sale as a desktop sale. With Win8, Microsoft may even have some tablet play, supposing they successfully blur the lines. Microsoft will keep drawing much revenue from Windows and Office, struggle with cloud stuff, continue to sink money into Bing, keep a big consumer presence with Xbox 720, and slowly creep up to barely interesting market share with Windows Phone.
The industry will shift from time to time, and Microsoft will invest 1% of its huge war chest to gain a foothold into new things, never quite succeeding, but never quite losing their whole stack. They are like that poker player who won a huge stack early on, and 5 hours later still has the same stack. Others also have big stacks, and everyone keeps wondering when they'll lose it, and then they get frustrated and derisive when their stack actually keeps slowly growing.
When it comes down to it, people are going to buy what is kick ass in at least one area. The WiiU doesn't kick any ass. Here's the problem:
Game library: Doesn't kick ass, but then it never does with a new console.
Hardware: Doesn't kick ass even when compared to current gen consoles. It's comparable to current consoles. It needs to not be comparable.
Integration: Missed the ass by a foot. Doesn't bring anything new or amazing.
New interactions and form factor: No asses have red marks.
Release strategy: Owners of asses are pulling up their trousers out of boredom.
Wow, finally a phone with a readable screen. Those 300ppi screens were just killing my eyes. That 1080p screen totally makes my 1280x768 screen obsolete. /s
I have a solution, but it involves simultaneous use of biological viruses and nukes. At a minimum, my solution will at least erase anyone's desire to care.
Many of you accuse Microsoft of understocking, and yet when it doesn't continue to sell a whole lot of units, you laugh at their sales? Maybe they just know roughly how many they expect to sell, and stock accordingly? That it sells out on the first day seems to draw unnecessary ire. You weren't really interested in buying it anyways, so why the hell do you care so much?
Really, it's almost as if many of you gain some kind of strange exhilaration from laughing at and faux outrage at Microsoft's missteps. Really, why? The only explanation I can think if is that you WANT to see Microsoft succeed - that many of you are secret Microsoft admirers who are left disappointed and needing an outlet to vent your frustration by mocking them.
Microsoft is doing an excellent job at ensuring their own mediocre results and their own gradual downfall. It really doesn't need you to mock them on the way down. That seems to be a byproduct of your own personality flaws.
After several years, you can become a true Broftware Engineer. Or, if you're more customer oriented, a Senior Brogram Manager.
And yet, if you somehow could do that with an iPad, I think you'd happily bash tablets that couldn't.
Here's where a bunch of Apple apologists chime in to the effect of: "If you're trying to do that with your iPad, you're using it wrong."
I'm really tired of hearing that. The only things an Ultrabook can't do that an iPad can come down to apps that qualify as curiosities. I'd rather spring $200 more for an Ultrabook that can pretty much do anything, not just what iPad owners proclaim as important.
Which is why hybrids like the Yoga are actually a compelling idea, despite the execution needing some refinement.
Completely legitimate comment to make. And one which Microsoft and Intel would surely approve of.
Personally, I am just as interested in the Acer W700 as SPro. Its dock, I admit, looks like it was made by Hasbro, but otherwise also looks on par.
When someone tells me my code is bad, I look them straight in the eye and say
Is my code bad, or is it BAD ASS. Aw yeah.
This.
I've posted on this before, but I am using an Acer W500 with Win8, and have found the experience to be surprisingly productive. At night, I lie around browsing tablet style, and it's pretty much on par with any iPad or Android tablet for most things. Win8 is still appallingly crappy in some areas (I'm looking at you, Windows Mail), but that's a software thing, not a design / hardware thing. In the morning, sometimes I work from home, and so I plug it into my 1080p 24" LCD, keyboard, mouse, and am happily opening terminals, browser windows, and other tools. The tablet screen acts as a second monitor - that's cool, too. My scanner, printer, camera, external DVD, and every USB peripheral I have work perfectly fine.
OS team: Good job, thanks for the speed improvements, retaining great hardware compatibility, and decent stability.
UI team: Ha ha, you guys are funny. You're not fired.
Apps team: You guys are not even funny, so you're fired.
A device can only be really good at one thing. This is not a new principle to design but pretty much the fucking foundation of industrial design.
You seem so sure of yourself, evident by the unnecessary profanity. And yet many highly successful products both past and present betray your assertion.
MP3 + Video player => iPod Touch and its ilk
MP3 + Video player + Browser + Apps + Phone => smartphones
Passenger car + SUV => Crossover SUV cars
Game Console + Media Center => PS3, Xbox 360, soon PS4 and Xbox 4
PC + LCD monitor hybrids => All in one PC's, iMac
Compact Camera + Interchangeable lens => Micro 4/3 (e.g. Sony NEX)
Printer + Scanner + Fax => Printer / Scanner / Fax (duh)
Radio + CD Player => Boombox, FM Walkman
Power Screwdriver + Power Drill => Combo Power Screwdriver / Drill
Hammer + Crowbar => Pretty much any hammer you find today
and the list goes on and on and on. Pretty much every one of these carries with it compromises that can be lambasted by anyone inclined to do so. In all successful cases, the benefits match or exceed the compromise. Some of these examples are more enduring than others, but the bottom line is that compromised hybrid designs are a fine way to go about product design.
Unlike the iPad, it also supports multiple users.
Like the iPad, it supports iTunes - except that it actually, like, runs it.
I wouldn't want to stay in a coffee shop or library all day, either. Fortunately, where I *do* work, I have a 2560x1600 monitor and a nice ass keyboard and mouse.
I wouldn't want to work all day on a MacBook Air, either.
Yes, older, wiser, greedier, selfish, and judgemental.
I found both the article and what JC wrote to be highly informative and rather validating of my approach to things. In software, we usually get little validation because of the wide variety of opinions of who we work with. We've all seen the extremes: The hard core C programmer who can't be bothered with any OO nonsense, and who advocates inspecting the assembly of every method you write. The C++ hippie who sees everything as some kind of exercise in getting the compiler to write the code for you.
I'm sure most of us follow a more balanced approach. C++ has to be about performance over anything else, otherwise there are plenty of other languages that accomplish much greater degrees of expression, but can't cash the performance check. But, expressibility is important, too, because performance goes out the door once we stop understanding what the code is doing. It's nice to have a language that lets you express things somewhat functionally, yet gives you the flexibility to wring out serious performance.
I think there are only 2 important aspects to code quality: performance and readability (I classify correctness under performance).
Both need a great deal of context to judge, and any judge will ultimately see what they want to see if they want to see it. It is impossible for a developer to judge without preconception. One developer working on highly parallel systems will, if they are predisposed to, gasp at your lack of use of parallelism. Another developer who lives and breathes C++ 11 will gasp that everything lacks move constructors and how your code could be refactored with lambdas.
I remember working in an audio group where I found a long algorithm to do a bit of sound processing. I gawked at how unwieldy it was, and proceeded to hotshot a new implementation that was 1/2 the number of lines. And then I was promptly reprimanded: the original code, ugly as it was, was that way because it was way more L2 cache friendly. I ended up setting the project back with my "less sucky" code. Doing a source diff history, I found a much shorter version as one of the initial versions.
The only rule when working in this industry is: Always be prepared to defend your decisions. If you can't, then either you deserve to be fired, or you're working in the wrong place.
Templated examples. I like it, we should do more template meta posting.