Tamerlin

On top of that, it's an observation based on past and repeated history. Apple has a long track record of stabbing its own 3rd party developers in the back -- witness 64-bit Photoshop CS4, and what Apple had to do with it.

I know CS5 is now 64-bit on both Windows and OSX, but the OSX users had to wait an extra 18 months because of Apple, not because of Adobe.

I don't think the two are related quite so closely.

The idea isn't to do everything alone. The idea behind the walkabout is indeed to find yourself -- and when you return, you are accepted into society as a member. It's a coming of age ritual, and finding yourself is one of those things that only you can do.

My sensei once told me that he could show me the road, but I had to walk it myself. I didn't get as far down the road of enlightenment (google Okinawa Kodokan if you want context) as I did without help, but I did walk the road myself.

IMO you're being too nice to Eclipse.

By comparison, take a look at Blender3D. It's a 22MB download, though you need a Python interpreter, which is also not all that large.

Eclipse is impressively bloated, but that's about the most positive thing I can say about it nowadays, especially after being stuck using it at amazon and disney. (Both of which had some of the poorest quality legacy code I've ever seen.)

Yeah, anyone who thinks that media is less complex or less demanding than programming should spend a day doing some visual effects work for a live action movie (try creating a virtual character sometime) or talk to the guy I'm working with to do my photo finishing.

The reality is that it's far, far more demanding than programming, especially with modern languages.

With proper up-front design effort, programming is easy. The catch is that the up-front design requires engineering skills and is actually challenging, and most of today's programmers skip that and dive right into programming... leading to the vast mountains of crap we have today. (Look at amazon's codebase sometime. It's such an atrocity that it drives people out of the industry.)

Thanks for those links. It's rather entertaining to see that a pretty good tech site is going to great lengths to make a case for both platforms being basically crap. And it's a strong case. :)

"If Apple switched to AMD processors, most of their computers would now be afflicted by a performance deficit in addition to the existing "Apple tax"."

Apple could potentially transition parts of its line to AMD processors, without completely abandoning Intel.

It seems likely that Sandy Bridge will be the CPU of choice for workstations, while Bulldozer will be the throughput winner (hence server oriented), and Bobcat the performance/watt featherweight. Of course, none of this is certain until the actual products are available.

Bobcat might not have the performance to match up to Sandy Bridge, but having an AMD/ATI graphics processor could potentially make it a good choice for a souped up AppleTV product aimed a little higher. Ok, quite a bit higher. Serious 3D gaming higher. And I'm pretty sure that AMD would LOVE a design win like that!

The competition from AMD plus the the narrowing margins in CPU's is part of what's leading AMD and Intel toward system on a chip solutions, but although that's bad for the likes of nVidia, it's good for OEM's like Apple.

"Not for long. Mobile Google has turned Trivial Pursuit into a typing competition."

I hope you're right.

"I'd also question the use of the phrase modern culture here."

You make a good point.

It reminds me of the Aborgine's navigation technique referred to as "Songlines" or "Dreaming Tracks" -- they didn't have maps and instruments to navigate with, so instead they told stories. With those stories, they could convey not only a route, but also the locations of water holes and foraging grounds, and by using the story as a mnemonic, it was easy to learn and remember as well as to pass on to another.

I think this is just a difference in terminology -- I don't think of this as memorizing, but rather as learning. When I think of memorizing, I think of someone going through a pile of flash cards or something and repeating them over and over again until their contents are a list of facts crammed into the person's head.

That said, we're saying the same thing -- rote memorization without applied knowledge isn't worth anything. Learning by doing is the way to go.

After repeated interactions with the biochem profs at JHU, I think that in their case, it wasn't temporary. Maybe it was due to spending so much time standing in front of a blackboard that it just stayed reduced... and they had slaves... er, I mean graduate students doing all of their research for them, so they probably weren't getting a whole lot of intellectual exercise.

"Programming on the other hand... code is either 0% correct or 100% correct. Anything less than 100% correct is broken."

I don't think that's even remotely close to accurate.

Spend a day looking at the Daily WTF, and consider that the Daily WTF is a LOT more representative of the IT world than HN is. There are raftloads of garbage code out there, and the people writing it can get away with it because it kind of works, even if most coders write 2000 lines to do what a competent coder would have done with 200.

In visual effects, the viewer is far LESS forgiving. Why do computer-generated water effects, even with multi-million dollar budgets, still look CG? It's because we are so familiar with what water looks like that we subconsciously pick up on miniscule flaws that are exceedingly difficult to groom out, because the computer-generated water requires so much computational power.

The IT industry as a whole is stark proof that code is far too forgiving. Look at the host of rants about corporate IT -- the vast majority of IT, and the reason that "enterprise" carries the connotations of certain 4-letter words. And look at films that are heavy with visual effects, and see how easily you can find flaws in them, and how much effort film makers put into creating those animations.

The difference? You can put broken code into production, and get away with it easily. Outside of communities like this, let's be honest -- hardly anyone can tell that the code is utter garbage, proven by the fact that most of it IS utter garbage.

Then look at how easily you can detect flaws in almost any visual art medium -- you might be surprised at how much effort goes into crafting a fine art photograph, given how easy it is to allow miniscule flaws to break the connection with the viewer.

In modern culture, that rote memorization is what passes for "smart" now.

Memorizing facts is always a waste of time.

The biophysics professor that I worked for in college had that attitude. He studied protein structure, but rather than wasting his time memorizing the structures of amino acids, he just worked with them, and eventually the knowledge of their structures became second nature. In biochemistry, the professors tried to make everyone memorize all of those structures... but even the professors didn't get them all correct.

Those same professors couldn't explain basic things like ionization, or make sense of the fact that .1 cm = 1mm.

Disaster sounds like a better word.

That's very true, and sadly it's also true that most of the time, the people choosing the purported elite are the least qualified to do so.

"Sidenote but I'm thankful to Matz for creating a language that makes disciplined programmers able to create highly maintainable code bases"

I agree with that. The "disciplined programmers" part is, however, the reason that I think that Ruby should be a reward for programmers who make it through C programming classes first.

Ruby's a great language, and a lot of fun to program with, but the same characteristics that make it an enjoyable language to use also make it possible for undisciplined programmers to get things done.

Visible examples of this in practice are actually legion.

One such is in nature photography, a passion of mine. Back when I was a total newbie, another photographer shared an image during a class on photography. His photograph had, in addition to an excellent composition, a stunning sky, and perfect light.

One person's response to the image was something like, "Wow, you were very lucky to get a sky like that for that shot!"

The photographer explained that it hadn't been luck. He had found the spot already, and knew what he wanted to get, knew what time of day would give him the highest likelihood of getting the right light to match his vision, and kept going back to that spot at the right time until everything came together.

Luck is what happens when experience meets opportunity.

He put himself in the right spot, and had the vision and skills to take advantage of an opportunity that he would not have gotten without being in the right place at the right time.

This concept isn't unique to photography obviously -- it's just more visible. :)

I think you're right, it does seem like a cultural thing. If you find something that's easy for you, you can choose to either stick with that one thing, or you can push your comfort zone and grow. Most americans these days are trained early on to stay in their comfort zone rather than growing, and it's getting ingrained into them.

I suspect that Apple's heading down the same road as XNA, because XNA enables a developer to build WPF applications that can run on Windows, XBox, and Zune; presumably also on the latest Windows Mobile as well.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if future versions, maybe even the upcoming release, set up an equivalent situation on the mac platform, now that Apple has a new TV device in addition to the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.

Heck, if Apple decided to be aggressive about getting into the living room and entertainment center, they could launch a box that's basically a souped up Apple TV with something close to an order of magnitude higher performance than an XBox 360 simply by building it around a Sandy Bridge, and have a significant contender in the gaming console market.

He's probably advocating that for the same reason that EA and Amazon prefer junior developers: they're more willing to tolerate being treated like slaves than seniors.

So have I. In fact, most of the "can't do" folks in their 20's and 30's that I've had to deal with were failing to solve easy problems. My peers and I had encountered these in the past, we had solved them, and didn't care to waste time trying to come up with new solutions to them. The ones who failed were too arrogant to listen to the voice of experience, and as a result they failed miserably.

That said, I've also encountered peers who were too set in their ways to change, and continued to fail in almost exactly the same way over and over again, refusing to learn from their own experience.

It goes both ways, but age has had very little to do with it in either case. It's usually been arrogance instead.

I agree, that's good advice -- it's what Sun should have done with Java instead of pushing the least common denominator UI libraries, which lead to a host of lousy UI's that worked equally poorly on every supported platform. :)

They had a lot of help ruining SGI from... SGI.

The reason that I suggest that MS ran SoftImage poorly is that under MS, Soft generated negative revenue, even though it was profitable before MS bought it. I have a feeling that it didn't become profitable again after Avid bought it though, because otherwise Avid probably wouldn't have sold it to AutoDesk.

Edit: The funny thing is that MS later acquired Caligari, and now has ANOTHER animation system, which the last I heard was a freebie under Microsoft.

I remember learning about the difference between static and dynamic friction.... so the fact that the force required to move two static objects exceeded what the coefficient of friction wasn't surprising. Have people forgotten this? Or is the reporter just physics-challenged?

MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly. It had a lot of potential, particularly since MS could have parlayed it into a part of the premiere games development platform, but they bobbled it pretty badly and ended up with trueSpace instead, which has really never come even close to living up to its potential.

Autodesk and Adobe compete really only in digital audio & video editing, and compositing. The rest of Adobe doesn't really have much impact on any of Autodesk's businesses.

I suspect that Autodesk bought Alias for Alias:Studio rather than for Maya, because Alias:Studio is the Big Dog revenue stream there, and among Autocad's biggest competitors.

Apple's also not really a software company.

Still, even if you ONLY look at Apple's software revenues, I suspect that Apple would turn out to be more diversified than Google. :)

If you invent something that by itself has no commercial value whatsoever, but could make someone else's idea either viable or more profitable (maybe it makes their widget easier to build?), then you're basically saying that your invention isn't patentable, even though by licensing it you could enable another company to benefit from your work while being compensated for it.

Wow, that was a long sentence.

Anyway, that's the whole point behind patents in the first place. It's to allow the inventor to be able to stand up to a big company and negotiate on at least somewhat equal footing, and finding an agreeable set of licensing terms.

Then you could be an inventor instead of a builder, and come up with ideas that others can use to build stuff.

You're suggesting that there should not be any such thing as an inventor who doesn't build stuff, because you're proposing that such individuals are invariably shot in the back.

"If your sole source of revenue is licensing the patents that you've created, you're a patent troll."

False. An inventor's sole source of income might well be licensing patents -- such a person is making a living by inventing things. Hence the term "inventor" ;))

A patent troll is someone who abuses that aspect of the system, like IBM. They try to make their patents as broad as possible, and then use them to prevent other companies from making progress, rather than making the licensing process into a collaboration between entities -- allowing the inventor to create the shoulders atop which the builders stand.

That's even worse than the CS student (she had a bachelor's degree in CS, and was in the final year of her master's degree program in CS)... she actually attempted to delete an object in C++ by calling its destructor directly.

Needless to say, my company didn't try to keep her when Booz Allen Hamilton recruited her away from us.

I suspect that you're right about the weather, this would probably be a be a place with a lot of storms.

On the other hand, if there's both sufficient water AND enough air for life as we know it on our planet's surface (excluding the extremeophiles like the flora living in Grand Prismatic Spring for the moment), the terminator wouldn't be nearly as clear as it is on Mercury, which has no atmosphere. Oceans of air and water would help to distribute heat throughout the world, much like they do here on Earth.

You're ahead of Seattle. I came here from DC, and wow what a step backward.

As it turns out, we had a trolley-based mass transit system until GM and Ford (and Exxon?) bought it up and dismantled it. (No joke.)

When I lived in Sterling, it was a 15-minute drive to Dulles. When I moved to Silver Spring, it was a 45-minute drive.

From Sterling, there were no mass transit options whatsoever, AFAIK. Of course, with a 15-minute trip, there's really not much incentive to look for alternatives.

From Silver Spring, you CAN get to Dulles via mass transit... I had to walk to a bus stop, take the red line downtown, change to the orange line out to West Falls Church, and take a Washington Flyer to the airport: 2.5 hours.

So I agree... worthless.

I also found that biking from Silver Spring to Crystal City took approximately the same amount of time as the bus/metro combination, and had fewer delays.

Would you believe, btw, that Seattle's equivalent to the Metropass has a 24-hour latency? So if you put money on it, you have to wait for 24 hours before you can use it?

These tend to be the same folks who deny that it's broken, leading to piles and piles of steaming code that make adding new features and fixing problems exceedingly difficult. They routinely turn simple, six-week projects into six-month death march projects.

Oops. I lost track of product names frequently, especially since there are so many ;)

You're probably also right about the reason for starting out with a PPC based system. I'd heard about a similarly sized offer for Be, as well as JLG's refusal.

There weren't a lot of realtime OS's out there, and still aren't -- BeOS could have been the next OS/2, only without IBM's marketing behind it. (Can anyone say, "Friendly fire?")