alxp

He's telling the students that they, being Ivy League graduates, will have many opportunities to exploit their positions, and is telling them to be aware of this and exercise some humility by remembering that luck has largely brought them where they are.

WebOS's biggest problem was UI performance. Sick, sad irony strikes again.

It seems Lion's implementation of restarting apps depends on SSD type speeds. Also a fairly fat application like a browser has an entirely different amount of work to do before it stops loading compared with the very thin media players that this BeOS demonstration would have been demoing. Apples to Oranges, but BeOS's being multi-thread-mandatory from the start where Lion's application resume was an add-on feature to mature apps will make the difference pretty glaring.

Don't forget all the music and movies that you've payed for in one market or another that you might not be able to transfer easily to your new device. Building a complete consumption ecosystem was very smart of Apple and it's why Amazon has grabbed the lion's share of Android tablets with a pretty lackluster debut.

Yeah most music is DRM-free these days but as far as most users know, their iPhone knows how to talk to iTunes and their other phone doesn't, end of story.

This post we're discussing _is_ the popular pressure. And yes, I also wish them good luck because the pendulum is currently far too in the direction against fairness to end-users.

> I also think that most people bought this only because they wanted to prove to the world that it would work (DRM-less and cheap media).

I think the number of people concerned with making a gesture to push some political agenda about DRM is dwarfed by the number of people who like Louis C.K.'s stuff from HBO and FX and think $5 is a great deal for a 60 minute special.

They just try to pass laws to make interoperability (format shifting) a criminal offence.

Looks like the Nokia partnership may be their last best hope. Android can have the crapware-laden low-end of the Smartphone market and Microsoft and Apple can be seen as the quality brands, and if Nokia sells enough phones it will at least save MS's reputation.

Just change the documentation at the same time as you change a feature. That's all the author expected. Not doing that makes you a bad developer.

> pedestrians have more of an ability to take evasive action

Except when they don't, due to mobility problems or having pets with them or other reasons. Expecting anyone to jump out of your way when you come barreling down the sidewalk is going to hurt someone.

If you pass off "integration" as some kind of unimportant side issue you just don't get why Apple has been successful and why your white box PC is not the future.

This is correct, but US immigration are quite picky about the kinds of job titles that they will allow you to gat a TN visa for. The general rule is the job title needs to say "computer analyst" and "management consultant", and avoid the words 'developer', 'programmer' and 'manager'.

Also smaller border crossings tend to be better than large airports. YVR and YYZ are quite strict about documentation requirements and are a bit power-trippy from my and friends' experiences. Land crossings are better.

Don't buy anything second-hand unless they can show the proof-of-purchase so you know you're not buying a hot item. This isn't new advice.

One day after a visit to the Computer History Museum, my SO and I got to see the live demo of the analytical engine they have there. We watched the gears turning and stopping to add up numbers, saw the complex mechanisms to handle carrying digits, and she asked me how this would work if it was binary and I just said "much more simply". Then she admitted that, even though she has been working as a developer and manager of developers for years, she never learned binary.

When we got home I got out a pad and pencil and got her to write down 0, then 1, then asked her, if you only had two digits, what would come next? Tentatively she wrote 1 0. THen I asked her to add 1 to it. We more or less carried on the way this transcript went, except instead of using aliens with two fingers I introduced AND, OR and XOR 'boxes' that 0s and 1s go in and come out. I hadn't planned any of this but by the end of it she was just about drawing the circuit diagram of a full adder with carry bit.

I'm sort of thrilled to see that what I was doing is precisely the socratic method. I love teaching, never really did much of it until I gave a course in Unix and shell scripting at an old job but for a week I had more energy at work than I ever did just programming or in meetings.

That wouldn't give you a control group, either, that would give you a new set of students, and would let you answer the question "how successful are students hwo graduate without being crippled by student debt compered with dropouts and a control group of students how received no special assistance and graduated anyway."

I would be very interested in this experiment, but subsidizing a student's education in the US doesn't give you a 'control' group, but a very privileged group.

Happy to see a mention of New Brunswick, Canada in there. UNB has a very underrated Computer Science faculty that graduates a lot of great programmers, but they don't have a recognizable name outside of Canada. Companies that get well-known that remain in Atlantic Canada will help change this.

That's why NetFlix was greeted with open arms by the TV networks at first - because they could make money from their shows that are sitting in their library that they weren't selling on DVD and syndicators weren't interested in. Now that NetFlix is as huge aas it is the networks are getting greedy and want to grab the whole cookie back again thinking consumers will pay first-run rates for third-run content.

I had this kind of relationship with a designer / photographer I worked on a side project with a couple of years back. He'd have no idea how to implement something if it required more than just hacking on already-existing code, but he had a great eye for detail and was excellent at not letting something sit unfinished. So I would talk out with him the various features we could add, then we'd agree on what to pursue, I'd get it up and running and he'd clean up parts, file bugs and be a good partner for getting the full widget out the door. At my day job I'm usually the one re-architecting something-or-other on the back end when I know I should be doing more mundane things more of the time.

The economists' models of the world are notoriously flawed and dangerous precisely because they leave out non-easily-measurable results and consequences.

Which is a sensible clause for Apple, so that Amazon can't go and say "all books bought on the Kindle device are 50% off what you pay when you buy the book on the Kindle for iPad app" to drive device sales.

Oh nevermind, it's just an artifact of the smaller viewport.

I still want you kids off my lawn, though.

What the what I'm walking backwards?? What crazy magic is this? Super Mario Bros. should be frozen in time exactly as I remember them, damnit.

They can keep it up until they are ruled to be a monopoly - I'm not sure that will happen to them but when it does then they can't act the way they do now without consequences.

Hah now Wolfram Alpha, I wonder if they're going to bother coming back in to work tomorrow. Watson makes it look pretty primitive.

I don't think that's relevant. No one expected Deep Blue to have a mechanical arm that reaches out and moves pieces around a physical chess board.

Arguing against fanboy conventional wisdom with mere facts? Sadly I don't think that's enough.

I like it. Automatically having a group chat when you make a call with multiple people, and saving group chats in your history are the two things that have kept me using the Skype 5 and not downgrading. And now that the focus problem when app switching bug is fixed I really don't have any major problems with it.

Yep, also if you just have 1 reputation getting downvoted doesn't cost you anything, you stay at 1. So it doesn't hurt in the least even if this did occur, which I haven't seen myself, either. I often see that SO users will be helpful to new users who seem to be trying to be helpful.

BitBucket seems to have a lot of Python projects hosted there which might take a chunk out of Python's share on Github.

Apple certainly could have made it easier to put any old video you want into iTunes, I think they made a strategic decision to coax people into purchasing video through iTunes by making it hard to just drop AVIs into it. If they had tried this with iTunes - come out with the music store before the player and limited you to only listening to music you bought through the store, they'd have been dead in the water. I'm sure they're more than happy with the sales of videos in iTunes but they certainly left a pretty wide hole where iTunes could have been the default video player for everything instead of just their own stuff.