Shebanator

Do you think that is only a problem in government? Fads are a fundamental part of human nature.

In tech, we have many examples: Agile, Ruby on Rails, React, RISC, OOP, microservices, and so on and so on. All have some real benefits, but also have or have had huge hype cycles.

You can make the same argument for most other industries (if not all of them). And then there are things like diets, religions, etc.

I think its a good article, but I'm confused about the author's implication that the state government is consciously choosing to depend on income and capital gains tax revenues. California does depend on those taxes, but not by choice: Prop 13 made it basically impossible for property tax revenues to grow at the same rate as the economy.

I also agree with the other comments here that this author seems to think SF == Bay Area. Much of his comments about hippies and landlords conspiring make no sense in the rest of the bay, where it is actually relatively wealthy homeowners conspiring to prevent growth in order to ride the surge in home prices.

Google's tech track does go all the way to VP equivalents.

Well, my wife and I always say that when it came to tech companies, we were "lucky but not that lucky." I worked for one startup whose IPO was filed the day before the bubble burst, and after that had a job offer from pre-IPO Google that I turned down because I figured the stock would be lower than my strike price by the time I could exercise. Oops.

Ambiguous != misleading - the latter implies intent

I must be missing something. Where do they say they send data to google?

Are we talking about the Assistant/Alexa integration, which sounds fairly focused? I guess the key question is whether or not they are sending data when you aren't using Assistant or Alexa.

Or are we talking about the fact that they are using ad networks to show ads? The latter isn't anything different than any site that sends ads.

That reply was pretty bad as well. But at least he didn't tell someone to shove things up their butt.... :-)

Yes, exactly. Thanks for chiming in.

Servers have logs, which can have a lot of personal data in them. Not all of that logging is under your control, especially if you rely on 3rd party services like AWS. This is a simple example but there are many more.

These kinds of responses are unhelpful. Yes, data protection is incredibly important. That doesn't mean that GDPR as written is a well-done regulation - in point of fact its insanely complicated and its pretty much impossible to know whether or not you comply, even if you store zero data about users. It also doesn't mean that people who don't want to deal with GDPR don't care about privacy. Tarring and feathering someone for such things is lazy and unfair.

On a related note, if in NYC I highly recommend the walking pizza tour: http://www.scottspizzatours.com/

Heh. I just posted this at more or less the same time as you. But I deleted my comment to clean things up.

I'm baffled how the author could look at these code samples and say that the Rust and Javascript versions were mostly identical.

This. I left Adobe in 2008 (involuntarily :-) ), and it boggles my mind that they haven't done this sort of fuzz testing and fixed the issues in the last 10+ years. Sure, putting the code in a sandbox covers a multitude of sins, but I don't think that is sufficient. Many other Adobe products use the same code to read/write PDF files, and AFAIK they don't do it in a sandbox.

Also, even though Taligent was a monumental disaster, it wasn't all bad. There is a lot of stuff you use every day that came directly out of Taligent's work. For instance, the i18n libraries for Java and ICU (http://site.icu-project.org/design/cpp) were early important work. A lot of unicode came from Taligent's work (but not all of it), and the President of the Unicode Consortium, Mark Davis, did a lot of the formative work at Taligent. So at the end of the day you can thank (or blame) Taligent for emojis.

Taligent also had quite a bit of influence on the field of unit testing, which I'm proud to have had a hand in. I've written about this in the past: https://shebanator.com/2007/08/21/a-brief-history-of-test-fr...

I wrote one of those books, specifically "The Power of Frameworks". Like I said, I was definitely deep in the hype cycle at the time.

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Frameworks-Windows-Os/dp/020148...

It isn't fair to blame Taligent for that hype. Several of these systems existed before Pink/Taligent project was ever discussed publicly. Heck, we used to talk about how our stuff was better than COM and CORBA all the time.

And OpenDoc was developed more or less simultaneously with Pink IIRC. But its been a long time and I never worked on OpenDoc so I might have the timing off a bit on this one.

I agree that the OO hype at the time was crazy, and I was extremely guilty of that mania at the time. But from my POV (as a Pink/Taligent employee) the failures of Taligent had little to do with that. It was much more a problem of constantly moving goalposts (we're an OS! Now we're an OS and a layer on top of AIX! Now we're going to be an optional window manager for AIX!) and vicious politics.

It wasn't actually proceeded by Pink. Copland and Pink were going on in parallel, and the competition between them (and the original MacOS folks as well) was intense. Pink was the first to lose that battle, and got spun out as a result.

Source: I worked on Pink/Taligent for six years. Prior to that I supported A/UX and MPW in MacDTS.

Peter is a director, and Urs is a senior VP. As such, they are now both on the management ladder. I think the article was discussing only people who were on the eng ladder.

all this fuss over 10 google employees?

FYI, according to The Verge, the new MB Ev will have 200 mile range and 4.9 second 0-60.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/4/17818836/mercedes-benz-eqc...

The i-pace is a very nice car, but their sales challenges make it unlikely to be a serious competitor. I thought about buying one myself, but Jag's reputation scared me off.

https://autoweek.com/article/luxury/jaguar-i-pace-ready-poun...

The sold 250 cars in europe in its first full quarter of availability, compared to 7K Tesla models sold:

http://carsalesbase.com/european-car-sales-data/jaguar/jagua...

http://carsalesbase.com/european-car-sales-data/tesla/

Q1 2019 is still at least six months before MB will have a viable competitor available to purchase. Probably more like 12 months before MB has it available in quantity. Too soon to say what availability will be for the Audi and Porsche competitors. But thanks for the snark.

Yes, Tesla's profitability is an entirely different discussion, and IMHO one that really isn't all that relevant to how it will compete with MB, VW, etc. over the next few years.

They have already sold a lot of Model 3s, and they have 16 months to sell a lot more of them. Personally I don't really care all that much about when they hit 5k/week, 6k/week, or whatever. Even if they stayed at 4k/week that is 240K cars over the next 16 months, plus however many S/X/Y models they sell in that time.

The counter argument is that the demand for the 3 will be exhausted at some point, which could well be true. But the availability of the cheaper short range Model 3 will spike demand before that happens.

EDIT: fixed broken math

Meh. MB are planning to start production sometime in 2H2019, and no real details about the capabilities of the car. Meanwhile Porsche's Taycan will cost more than the Model S while having Model 3-like specs. The new Audi e-tron will also have 250 mile range and a 6 sec 0-60, both worse than the Tesla Model X.

Meanwhile Tesla has another 16 months or so to keep selling the Model 3 in large quantities. Color me unimpressed by the german companies' efforts thus far.

It is telling though that most of the companies are focusing on SUVs and not sedans. Tesla needs to up its game with the X and Y to address this.

I agree that this is mostly how Apple views things, but what you said doesn't contradict the post you replied to at all. He is a developer whose livelihood is dependent on Apple, and he is tired of being jerked around. Just because Apple doesn't prioritize his problems doesn't make that untrue.

"At this point, the researchers also realized that the heat could inadvertently melt the adhesive cellophane and cause the flaming SPTs to suddenly eject from the toaster. Unfortunately, this did not occur."

QOTD!

For me, the trackpad is the thing that got me to get rid of my MBP and replace it with a Pixelbook. I was getting false positive clicks all the time while typing, which would move the cursor and destroyed my productivity. And I was not hitting it accidentally - I contorted my hands into all sorts of strange positions and it still happened, I had people observe me while it occurred, etc. Happened on two different MBPs, but the tech support folks at my company couldn't make it happen. Must be something weird about my capacitive field. Much happier with the Pixelbook, especially since I can now run Android Studio on it along with other Linux apps.