Technology companies like Google and Facebook already give us things for free. I imagine that some day maybe they'll do the same with tangible things like food or an apartment.
A Facebook account, though seemingly trivial, is wealth. Seeing and chatting with friends and families across the country is a benefit given us for free.
GMail is a form of wealth. So are the other free Google apps like Calendar and Drive.
Because they're software, if distributed across the world, the cost for Google and Facebook for each account approaches zero, but it is not free for them (R&D, hard drives, electricity, and so on). But I guess somehow they're making enough money with advertising to offset their costs and even make a nice profit.
I can imagine one day food and apartments and transportation will be given away for free by Farmoo, MyPlace, and CarsRUs, if we only put up with a little bit of advertising.
Or also like Google, Pandora, etc., the fees that some are willing to pay for premium services (fancier food, apartments, cars) may defray the costs of the basic costs for the rest of us.
The Big If of course is when technology makes the production of food, apartments, and transportation (may be a bike or a bus for every person, not a whole car, or maybe self-driving taxi on demand) as cheap for a company as software more or less is. Sorry I left that out, but hopefully you all surmised it from the other facts of the conversation.
Technology companies like Google and Facebook already give us things for free. I imagine that some day maybe they'll do the same with tangible things like food or an apartment.
A Facebook account, though seemingly trivial, is wealth. Seeing and chatting with friends and families across the country is a benefit given us for free.
GMail is a form of wealth. So are the other free Google apps like Calendar and Drive.
Because they're software, if distributed across the world, the cost for Google and Facebook for each account approaches zero, but it is not free for them (R&D, hard drives, electricity, and so on). But I guess somehow they're making enough money with advertising to offset their costs and even make a nice profit.
I can imagine one day food and apartments and transportation will be given away for free by Farmoo, MyPlace, and CarsRUs, if we only put up with a little bit of advertising.
Or also like Google, Pandora, etc., the fees that some are willing to pay for premium services (fancier food, apartments, cars) may defray the costs of the basic costs for the rest of us.
Why does plastic make things so much cheaper? (I'm in software. With mechanical things, my IQ drops to 50. The answer is likely so obvious that will make me look even dumber.)
Why do manufacturers opt for plastic so much over metal (or rubber or glass or whatever higher-quality material is best for each part)? Phones weigh ounces, and aren't such materials still just pennies per ounce?
Yes, I know labor adds to the cost, so making a phone (or a camera or a computer) with better materials would be more than the cost of the raw materials. But still, in what seems to be my utter naivete, I would guess that still it would be just a few dollars per unit.
Why are so many things made from plastic and so few made from anything else? Does it really save the manufacturer that much money?
For reasons most of us don't understand (myself included) the Chromebook is apparently selling like hot cakes, with some manufacturers finding they sell more Chromebooks than all their Windows laptops put together.
And if you think that doesn't make sense, you're in good company, but you only have to look at sales of a device of an even more crippled laptop*, one that doesn't even have a keyboard and requires use only of applications (themselves even more stripped down than normal) that the manufacturer approves of, that costs more than many regular, full sized, full spec'd, laptops, to understand that the market doesn't always produce winners that nerds like you and me see as obvious.
* Four letters, first is lowercase. Rhymes with "Sad".
Because you're taking the wrong measurements. Chromebooks outspec an expensive Windows laptop, if you measure the right things.
So what if you laptop has a faster processor and more memory, if it throws it all away computing a bloated operating system and waiting on a slow-spinning hard drive? You're measuring the wrong thing. Measure boot time.
So what if your laptop runs more applications, if many of them are dupes of each other or are ones that most people wouldn't use anything. You're couting the wrong thing. Count real-world things that you get done.
So what if your screen is bigger if it goes black after three hours away from the wall? You're looking at the wrong thing. Look at freedom to take your laptop out for a day.
More people have unlimited minutes, and after 9 p.m. there are fewer fellow drivers on the road. So looking for a statistical uptick in wrecks after 9 p.m. seems weak.
Also weak is looking for a statistical downtick in states that banned it. It's banned here, but I still see many doing it (anecdotal, I know).
And according to the summary, those two factors are their sole argument.
As far as I'm concerned PC derives from IBM PC. It's a PC if it's an IBM PC, a clone, or one of it's descendants. So it's CPU will be in on of the x86 compatible descendants. And it's firmware will be BIOS, or one of it's descendants such as UEFI (that emulates BIOS for compatibility.)
The rule of thumb is that a PC is a machine that can run the x86 build of DOS and/or Windows natively.
ARM based tablets are not PCs. iPad is not a PC. Android tablets aren't PCs. The Microsoft Surface that runs Windows RT isn't a PC. The one that runs Windows 8 is a PC.
For those of you who do hiring, what is the best way to sell this type of background?
As one who is hiring, I would rather not people try to "sell" me anything. I need to deal with the facts (I worked here and did this, I worked there and did that) and form my own judgments. At least to me, "sell" means "spin," means highlight the positives, means hide the negatives, etc. As someone who'll have to deal with you, day in day out, I would rather know everything up front. In other words, you're dumb for asking employers for advice on how to sweet-talk us.
Even so, I will say this in hopes that it really will help. I hire for raw materials, not expertise. That works for my job (web programming). It may not work for others (nuclear reactor maintenance). In other words, I look for good designers, people who share my sense of taste, people who get that less is more, etc. If they know Perl but not JavaScript, that's nothing to me. It would take two weeks for someone really good in Perl to become workable in JavaScript. In a year they will be better than the guy who has programmed in JavaScript for three years who has no basic sense of design.
even the most essential functions like detailed formatting of figures and legends
Are you serious?
DOS WordPerfect was more sophisticated
Did DOS WordPerfect allow several people to edit a file at the same time, showing each person's changes right away, in nothing but a web browser?
Google engineers can make a self-driving car, you'd think they could program a decent word processor in an afternoon
Are you a programmer? As a web programmer for many years, I feel it would be easier to make a self-driving car than a word processor that does everything Microsoft Word does, plus the aforementioned web features.
it's been a long time since any of these companies introduced anything indisputably new
Like forever.
People who use the word innovation are either young or senile. Is there anything that is truly new? The secret to their success is not innovation but excellence. Apple, Facebook, and Google were not the first to make the products that they are famous for, not a single one. But theirs were maybe the best, or at least the favorite.
The reporter's focus on innovation instead of excellence is my first problem with the article. My other problem is his focus on the size of a company instead of its culture. Culture is more important.
Google, despite its size, looks like it has kept its culture of excellent execution and ideas that are --- I will say "fresh" instead of "new." They've been around before, for some reason failed to catch on, and here are being tried again, with tweaked settings or more competence or whatever so that maybe they'll work this time.
Apple, no matter its size, would probably have tapered off after the departure of Steve Jobs. Read his biography and you'll see just how much his relentless, even maniacal, perfectionism was behind Apple's products.
Facebook, I don't know enough about to comment. It could go either way.
Great headline, mediocre summary. Typical Slashdot.
Follow the journalistic practice of the inverted pyramid. It's a widespread tradition among news reporters for a reason.
The headline should tell the whole story. If I wanted, I could read all the headlines in a newspaper and know all the stories. Just not the details. The first sentence, the lead, should tell the story, a little bit more, perhaps, than the headline, or at least in fully grammatical instead of clipped English. If I wanted, I could read all the headlines and leads in a newspaper and know all the stories. Just not the details. The first paragraph should tell the whole story, beginning, middle, and end. If I wanted, I could read all the first paragraphs in a newspaper and know all the stories. Just not every detail. The following paragraphs should present details, the most important first, the smallest, least meaningful details in the last sentence of the last paragraph, so that at any moment I could stop reading and still have the complete story. Just not every tedious last detail.
Again, the poster did it beautifully in the headline, but the summary paragraph left out the juiciest part. Why did Airbus not want to build this plane? It didn't have to go into all the details. That's the job of the linked article. But one sentence, or even half a sentence, would suffice. For example:
The BBC reports that the Airbus A350XWB (extra wide body) has made its first flight. Like the Boeing 787, the A350 offers airlines the chance to combine long-range services with improved fuel efficiency. But at first Airbus did not want to build it, because it was already overbudget and late on another airplane, the A380. But Airbus needed an answer to Boeing's new Dreamliner. The A350's fuselage is made of carbon fibre reinforced plastic, while many other parts of the aircraft use titanium and advanced alloys to save weight. It also has state-of-the-art aerodynamics, and engine manufacturer Rolls Royce has produced a new custom-designed power unit.
I'm not a wine snob, but I know there are certain things that sometimes you *can't* replicate.
After decades of analysis, we still can't build a violin as good as a Stradivarius. We still can't fully replicate Damascus Steel (OK, maybe the lack of a living slave in which to quench the blade is part of that:-P). I'd argue that fine liquors -- wines, whiskeys, etc... fall into that category. I'd say it's almost an art form.
I'll admit it, I have no evidence for that last assertion/argument. But I'm a romantic at heart,
As a fellow romantic, I must tell you, that's your problem. I thought the same thing until I read The Wine Trials, in which the authors ran blind taste tests, with cheaper wines often winning. For example, Domaine Ste. Michelle ($12) consistently outranked Dom Perignon ($150). In the 2007-08 experiment, the 507 tasters "represented many different segments of the wine-buying world. . . . Some were wine experts, others everyday wine drinkers. They included New York City sommeliers (wine stewards) and Harvard professors, winemakers from France, neuroscientists and artists, top chefs and college students, doctors and lawyers, wine importers and wine store owners, novelists and economists, TV comedy writers and oenologists (wine scientists), bartenders and grad students, 21-year-olds and 88-year-olds, socialists and conservatives, heavy drinkers and lightweights."
As for Stradivarius, "the many blind tests from 1817 to the present have never found any difference in sound between Stradivari's violins and high-quality violins in comparable style of other makers and periods, nor has acoustic analysis," so sayeth Wikipedia, but you can consult its citations at the bottom.
I am trying to move to your set-up, from my Web 3.0 fanciness.
The 1984 Mac was my first computer, with all its GUI wizardry. I got into programming from the top down, HTML first, then PHP and SQL. My strength is user interface design (although I'm mastering databases more and more and loving it).
The command line is text. But what you forget is that most GUI's are also text, just with a fancy box around it.
The GUI's for n00bs, the command line for l33ts. Seriously. The whole attraction of the GUI is that you can discover how it works by clicking around, by reading the menu choices, etc. You can't do that with the command line. Your chances of happening upon the right command by trying different key combinations are practically zero. There's simply no substitute for reading --- either the man page or googling it.
But the advantage of the command line is that, once you've learned it, you work faster. You have great power at your fingertips. Chances are you can do more things, faster, than even a power user of a GUI.
To ram home the idea that I was not predisposed to favor the command line, before I even did HTML I was into graphic arts. My college major was film production. But I can draw a parallel between the command line and professional cameras. At first blush, professional video equipment is a step back. It's bulkier, with fewer niceties. There is no professional camera with autofocus. They all prefer manual-focus lenses. Why? Because after a few weeks of practice you can manually focus faster and more accurately (and more artistically) than any autofocus system.
This is kind of a bad example because digital photography has made everyone, even professionals, buy new equipment. But back, say, in the 90's, when your choices were film or film, professional photographers often held onto --- and preferred --- a Hasselblad from the 1960s. Little more than a box that pulled film. But it did it reliably and simply, and everyone knows that the difference is in the operator (and great lenses don't hurt, manual focus of course).
While I like science fiction, I don't like this law:
1. Onerous, cluttersome. The United States has too many laws. Do politicians feel insignificant if they don't make them? Maybe they need to adopt the mindset of good programmers and take pleasure in refactoring the legal code down to a smaller, more elegant set.
2. Counterproductive. As said by others, making people read something has no guarantee of making them like it. In fact, they'll like it less. If he were really clever, he would outlaw science fiction. Then teens would want to read it.
3. Defiling. Art does not exist to advance the industrial usefulness of its citizens. It cheapens a culture if art is appreciated for things like like better factories, cars, and drugs. Hey, this does sound like 1984!
While it would be bad to have many standards (like HTML, MS-ML, ORACLE-ML, etc.) it's good to have many implementations of that standard (WebKit, Gecko, Blink).
The ability to "delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat" is justification alone to fork the project. Another good reason from the blog is the fragile workarounds for old APIs:
Our current networking code in WebKit is limited by old Mac WebKit API obligations which cannot be changed. Chromium has worked around some of these limitations over the years, but these work-arounds have proven fragile and have long been a source of bugs.
I think Google invented GMail, Calendar, and even Chromebooks for its own employees, to simplify its own IT and also to lean less on competitors like Microsoft.
Now that they can sell it to the rest of the world, great, but if those products never made any money, they still would be saving Google money or at least headaches. My company uses Microsoft Office and I daily envy users of Google Apps for email, chat, etc.
Vocational schools and training programs are unpopular because they suffer from a low statue of for people from unsuccessful, poor, or peasant backgrounds.
Jobs got engineers to do really good work. That was his contribution to society.
He lacked the technical interest to make anything on his own. No product from Apple ever could be called new. But then again I believe the same applies to any product from any company. The distinguishing characteristic of Apple and reason for its success was not creativity but flawless execution. And again, the same could be said for Google and most successful people or companies.
Again, the reason for Apple's success was flawless execution. This execution was by the hands of the engineers, not Jobs. However, Jobs was the one who gave them the room --- and whip --- to do it.
Programmers avoid writing documentation, because documentation is hard. They just got done working, working to write the program, and that was hard work. Now it is time to do the job all over again, in a different language: English. Someone may say the program was harder. I say, only slightly.
As many have said before, good documentation summarizes not only what the program does, but why. The why part is new. You didn't have to program the why part, just the what part. The computer doesn't care why. So you didn't have to tell it. But the why part helps humans hoping to understand your program immensely. Maybe because once they know your intention, they can guess your method, and so the program reads faster.
Anyway, that's why writing can be hard, even though you just wrote the program. Writing is hard because before you can write clearly about something, you first have to think clearly about it. And while writing the program, much of what and why you were programming was half-known to your mind, the rest in your gut or subconcious.
As stated in one of the highest-rated books about writing, On Writing Well, by William Zinsser:
Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves, as if they were working on any other project that requires logic: making a shopping list or doing an algebra problem. Good writing doesn't come naturally, though most people seem to think it does. Professional writers are constantly bearded by people who say they'd like to "try a little writing sometime" --- meaning when they retire from their real profession, like insurance or real estate, which is hard. Or they say, "I could write a book about that." I doubt it.
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology companies like Google and Facebook already give us things for free. I imagine that some day maybe they'll do the same with tangible things like food or an apartment.
A Facebook account, though seemingly trivial, is wealth. Seeing and chatting with friends and families across the country is a benefit given us for free.
GMail is a form of wealth. So are the other free Google apps like Calendar and Drive.
Because they're software, if distributed across the world, the cost for Google and Facebook for each account approaches zero, but it is not free for them (R&D, hard drives, electricity, and so on). But I guess somehow they're making enough money with advertising to offset their costs and even make a nice profit.
I can imagine one day food and apartments and transportation will be given away for free by Farmoo, MyPlace, and CarsRUs, if we only put up with a little bit of advertising.
Or also like Google, Pandora, etc., the fees that some are willing to pay for premium services (fancier food, apartments, cars) may defray the costs of the basic costs for the rest of us.
The Big If of course is when technology makes the production of food, apartments, and transportation (may be a bike or a bus for every person, not a whole car, or maybe self-driving taxi on demand) as cheap for a company as software more or less is. Sorry I left that out, but hopefully you all surmised it from the other facts of the conversation.
Technology companies like Google and Facebook already give us things for free. I imagine that some day maybe they'll do the same with tangible things like food or an apartment.
A Facebook account, though seemingly trivial, is wealth. Seeing and chatting with friends and families across the country is a benefit given us for free.
GMail is a form of wealth. So are the other free Google apps like Calendar and Drive.
Because they're software, if distributed across the world, the cost for Google and Facebook for each account approaches zero, but it is not free for them (R&D, hard drives, electricity, and so on). But I guess somehow they're making enough money with advertising to offset their costs and even make a nice profit.
I can imagine one day food and apartments and transportation will be given away for free by Farmoo, MyPlace, and CarsRUs, if we only put up with a little bit of advertising.
Or also like Google, Pandora, etc., the fees that some are willing to pay for premium services (fancier food, apartments, cars) may defray the costs of the basic costs for the rest of us.
Why does plastic make things so much cheaper? (I'm in software. With mechanical things, my IQ drops to 50. The answer is likely so obvious that will make me look even dumber.)
Why do manufacturers opt for plastic so much over metal (or rubber or glass or whatever higher-quality material is best for each part)? Phones weigh ounces, and aren't such materials still just pennies per ounce?
Yes, I know labor adds to the cost, so making a phone (or a camera or a computer) with better materials would be more than the cost of the raw materials. But still, in what seems to be my utter naivete, I would guess that still it would be just a few dollars per unit.
Why are so many things made from plastic and so few made from anything else? Does it really save the manufacturer that much money?
Huang believes the second generation will be more successful with the inclusion of Outlook
Yay, Outlook
For reasons most of us don't understand (myself included) the Chromebook is apparently selling like hot cakes, with some manufacturers finding they sell more Chromebooks than all their Windows laptops put together.
And if you think that doesn't make sense, you're in good company, but you only have to look at sales of a device of an even more crippled laptop*, one that doesn't even have a keyboard and requires use only of applications (themselves even more stripped down than normal) that the manufacturer approves of, that costs more than many regular, full sized, full spec'd, laptops, to understand that the market doesn't always produce winners that nerds like you and me see as obvious.
* Four letters, first is lowercase. Rhymes with "Sad".
Because you're taking the wrong measurements. Chromebooks outspec an expensive Windows laptop, if you measure the right things.
So what if you laptop has a faster processor and more memory, if it throws it all away computing a bloated operating system and waiting on a slow-spinning hard drive? You're measuring the wrong thing. Measure boot time.
So what if your laptop runs more applications, if many of them are dupes of each other or are ones that most people wouldn't use anything. You're couting the wrong thing. Count real-world things that you get done.
So what if your screen is bigger if it goes black after three hours away from the wall? You're looking at the wrong thing. Look at freedom to take your laptop out for a day.
More people have unlimited minutes, and after 9 p.m. there are fewer fellow drivers on the road. So looking for a statistical uptick in wrecks after 9 p.m. seems weak.
Also weak is looking for a statistical downtick in states that banned it. It's banned here, but I still see many doing it (anecdotal, I know).
And according to the summary, those two factors are their sole argument.
Just seems weak.
Do you lack leadership skills?
Yes.
There's nothing wrong with that. If all lead, who follows? Or, with more brass tacks, if all wear suits, who works?
<blink>No!!!</blink> They removed the blink tag!
As far as I'm concerned PC derives from IBM PC. It's a PC if it's an IBM PC, a clone, or one of it's descendants. So it's CPU will be in on of the x86 compatible descendants. And it's firmware will be BIOS, or one of it's descendants such as UEFI (that emulates BIOS for compatibility.)
The rule of thumb is that a PC is a machine that can run the x86 build of DOS and/or Windows natively.
ARM based tablets are not PCs. iPad is not a PC. Android tablets aren't PCs. The Microsoft Surface that runs Windows RT isn't a PC. The one that runs Windows 8 is a PC.
Then the decline of the PC is good news.
For those of you who do hiring, what is the best way to sell this type of background?
As one who is hiring, I would rather not people try to "sell" me anything. I need to deal with the facts (I worked here and did this, I worked there and did that) and form my own judgments. At least to me, "sell" means "spin," means highlight the positives, means hide the negatives, etc. As someone who'll have to deal with you, day in day out, I would rather know everything up front. In other words, you're dumb for asking employers for advice on how to sweet-talk us.
Even so, I will say this in hopes that it really will help. I hire for raw materials, not expertise. That works for my job (web programming). It may not work for others (nuclear reactor maintenance). In other words, I look for good designers, people who share my sense of taste, people who get that less is more, etc. If they know Perl but not JavaScript, that's nothing to me. It would take two weeks for someone really good in Perl to become workable in JavaScript. In a year they will be better than the guy who has programmed in JavaScript for three years who has no basic sense of design.
even the most essential functions like detailed formatting of figures and legends
Are you serious?
DOS WordPerfect was more sophisticated
Did DOS WordPerfect allow several people to edit a file at the same time, showing each person's changes right away, in nothing but a web browser?
Google engineers can make a self-driving car, you'd think they could program a decent word processor in an afternoon
Are you a programmer? As a web programmer for many years, I feel it would be easier to make a self-driving car than a word processor that does everything Microsoft Word does, plus the aforementioned web features.
From the summary:
it's been a long time since any of these companies introduced anything indisputably new
Like forever.
People who use the word innovation are either young or senile. Is there anything that is truly new? The secret to their success is not innovation but excellence. Apple, Facebook, and Google were not the first to make the products that they are famous for, not a single one. But theirs were maybe the best, or at least the favorite.
The reporter's focus on innovation instead of excellence is my first problem with the article. My other problem is his focus on the size of a company instead of its culture. Culture is more important.
Google, despite its size, looks like it has kept its culture of excellent execution and ideas that are --- I will say "fresh" instead of "new." They've been around before, for some reason failed to catch on, and here are being tried again, with tweaked settings or more competence or whatever so that maybe they'll work this time.
Apple, no matter its size, would probably have tapered off after the departure of Steve Jobs. Read his biography and you'll see just how much his relentless, even maniacal, perfectionism was behind Apple's products.
Facebook, I don't know enough about to comment. It could go either way.
I never liked MySQL's name anyway. It reminds me of Windows XP, with its My Documents, My Pictures, My Computer. Vain wordiness.
Okay, maybe it's more like AT&T U-verse and other advertising strategies that play to My Narcissism.
Great headline, mediocre summary. Typical Slashdot.
Follow the journalistic practice of the inverted pyramid. It's a widespread tradition among news reporters for a reason.
The headline should tell the whole story. If I wanted, I could read all the headlines in a newspaper and know all the stories. Just not the details.
The first sentence, the lead, should tell the story, a little bit more, perhaps, than the headline, or at least in fully grammatical instead of clipped English. If I wanted, I could read all the headlines and leads in a newspaper and know all the stories. Just not the details.
The first paragraph should tell the whole story, beginning, middle, and end. If I wanted, I could read all the first paragraphs in a newspaper and know all the stories. Just not every detail.
The following paragraphs should present details, the most important first, the smallest, least meaningful details in the last sentence of the last paragraph, so that at any moment I could stop reading and still have the complete story. Just not every tedious last detail.
Again, the poster did it beautifully in the headline, but the summary paragraph left out the juiciest part. Why did Airbus not want to build this plane? It didn't have to go into all the details. That's the job of the linked article. But one sentence, or even half a sentence, would suffice. For example:
The BBC reports that the Airbus A350XWB (extra wide body) has made its first flight. Like the Boeing 787, the A350 offers airlines the chance to combine long-range services with improved fuel efficiency. But at first Airbus did not want to build it, because it was already overbudget and late on another airplane, the A380. But Airbus needed an answer to Boeing's new Dreamliner. The A350's fuselage is made of carbon fibre reinforced plastic, while many other parts of the aircraft use titanium and advanced alloys to save weight. It also has state-of-the-art aerodynamics, and engine manufacturer Rolls Royce has produced a new custom-designed power unit.
Something like that.
I'm not a wine snob, but I know there are certain things that sometimes you *can't* replicate.
After decades of analysis, we still can't build a violin as good as a Stradivarius. We still can't fully replicate Damascus Steel (OK, maybe the lack of a living slave in which to quench the blade is part of that :-P). I'd argue that fine liquors -- wines, whiskeys, etc... fall into that category. I'd say it's almost an art form.
I'll admit it, I have no evidence for that last assertion/argument. But I'm a romantic at heart,
As a fellow romantic, I must tell you, that's your problem. I thought the same thing until I read The Wine Trials, in which the authors ran blind taste tests, with cheaper wines often winning. For example, Domaine Ste. Michelle ($12) consistently outranked Dom Perignon ($150). In the 2007-08 experiment, the 507 tasters "represented many different segments of the wine-buying world. . . . Some were wine experts, others everyday wine drinkers. They included New York City sommeliers (wine stewards) and Harvard professors, winemakers from France, neuroscientists and artists, top chefs and college students, doctors and lawyers, wine importers and wine store owners, novelists and economists, TV comedy writers and oenologists (wine scientists), bartenders and grad students, 21-year-olds and 88-year-olds, socialists and conservatives, heavy drinkers and lightweights."
As for Stradivarius, "the many blind tests from 1817 to the present have never found any difference in sound between Stradivari's violins and high-quality violins in comparable style of other makers and periods, nor has acoustic analysis," so sayeth Wikipedia, but you can consult its citations at the bottom.
On the other hand, I recently read that there ain't nothing like Roman concrete.
I am trying to move to your set-up, from my Web 3.0 fanciness.
The 1984 Mac was my first computer, with all its GUI wizardry. I got into programming from the top down, HTML first, then PHP and SQL. My strength is user interface design (although I'm mastering databases more and more and loving it).
The command line is text. But what you forget is that most GUI's are also text, just with a fancy box around it.
The GUI's for n00bs, the command line for l33ts. Seriously. The whole attraction of the GUI is that you can discover how it works by clicking around, by reading the menu choices, etc. You can't do that with the command line. Your chances of happening upon the right command by trying different key combinations are practically zero. There's simply no substitute for reading --- either the man page or googling it.
But the advantage of the command line is that, once you've learned it, you work faster. You have great power at your fingertips. Chances are you can do more things, faster, than even a power user of a GUI.
To ram home the idea that I was not predisposed to favor the command line, before I even did HTML I was into graphic arts. My college major was film production. But I can draw a parallel between the command line and professional cameras. At first blush, professional video equipment is a step back. It's bulkier, with fewer niceties. There is no professional camera with autofocus. They all prefer manual-focus lenses. Why? Because after a few weeks of practice you can manually focus faster and more accurately (and more artistically) than any autofocus system.
This is kind of a bad example because digital photography has made everyone, even professionals, buy new equipment. But back, say, in the 90's, when your choices were film or film, professional photographers often held onto --- and preferred --- a Hasselblad from the 1960s. Little more than a box that pulled film. But it did it reliably and simply, and everyone knows that the difference is in the operator (and great lenses don't hurt, manual focus of course).
While I like science fiction, I don't like this law:
1. Onerous, cluttersome. The United States has too many laws. Do politicians feel insignificant if they don't make them? Maybe they need to adopt the mindset of good programmers and take pleasure in refactoring the legal code down to a smaller, more elegant set.
2. Counterproductive. As said by others, making people read something has no guarantee of making them like it. In fact, they'll like it less. If he were really clever, he would outlaw science fiction. Then teens would want to read it.
3. Defiling. Art does not exist to advance the industrial usefulness of its citizens. It cheapens a culture if art is appreciated for things like like better factories, cars, and drugs. Hey, this does sound like 1984!
While it would be bad to have many standards (like HTML, MS-ML, ORACLE-ML, etc.) it's good to have many implementations of that standard (WebKit, Gecko, Blink).
The ability to "delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat" is justification alone to fork the project. Another good reason from the blog is the fragile workarounds for old APIs:
I think Google invented GMail, Calendar, and even Chromebooks for its own employees, to simplify its own IT and also to lean less on competitors like Microsoft.
Now that they can sell it to the rest of the world, great, but if those products never made any money, they still would be saving Google money or at least headaches. My company uses Microsoft Office and I daily envy users of Google Apps for email, chat, etc.
From the summary:
Can anyone tell me what this sentence means?
If someone else goes through something and writes about it, and I read it, is that really no basis for me to believe what they believe?
If so, then why did you bother to tell me about how it was for you?
Jobs got engineers to do really good work. That was his contribution to society.
He lacked the technical interest to make anything on his own. No product from Apple ever could be called new. But then again I believe the same applies to any product from any company. The distinguishing characteristic of Apple and reason for its success was not creativity but flawless execution. And again, the same could be said for Google and most successful people or companies.
Again, the reason for Apple's success was flawless execution. This execution was by the hands of the engineers, not Jobs. However, Jobs was the one who gave them the room --- and whip --- to do it.
Almost every day.
But we are a team of two, working on a private company intranet.
I suggest you read Getting Real.
Programmers avoid writing documentation, because documentation is hard. They just got done working, working to write the program, and that was hard work. Now it is time to do the job all over again, in a different language: English. Someone may say the program was harder. I say, only slightly.
As many have said before, good documentation summarizes not only what the program does, but why. The why part is new. You didn't have to program the why part, just the what part. The computer doesn't care why. So you didn't have to tell it. But the why part helps humans hoping to understand your program immensely. Maybe because once they know your intention, they can guess your method, and so the program reads faster.
Anyway, that's why writing can be hard, even though you just wrote the program. Writing is hard because before you can write clearly about something, you first have to think clearly about it. And while writing the program, much of what and why you were programming was half-known to your mind, the rest in your gut or subconcious.
As stated in one of the highest-rated books about writing, On Writing Well, by William Zinsser:
It sounds like they agree with Jason Fried, who cowrote the book Getting Real, which you can read free online. To wit, this chapter: Build Less.