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It's difficult to articulate this properly because most people don't even have a good understanding of what it means to dissent. Being rebellious isn't thinking differently, it is merely fighting the imposition of someone else's will upon your own. Thinking differently is looking at something in the most honest way you possibly can and attempting to refine your vision without allowing undue external influences to distract from the pursuit.

Rarely can you find a single person, much less an organization, that can avoid tunnel vision and approach problems without the taint of past success spoiling new opportunities. It's kind of amazing to watch.

This is not to say that there haven't been rudimentary search capabilities in the Apple TV. It's just not a focus.

My experience is in line with the author's. Finding a job has always been relatively easy (beginning at a certain point, which I will elaborate on) and I do not have a degree of any kind. It's my opinion that three factors are primarily responsible for my state of affairs.

1. I started working at a local ISP when I was 15 years old. This was around the time that 28.8kbps modems were all the rage. While I was very green I had unbounded enthusiasm and desire to learn whatever I could about technology. The ISP got a super cheap tech support person and I got paid to learn. After a year I got a chance to do UNIX sysadmin work, and my level of experience began to snowball.

The (fairly obvious) takeaway here is that I built experience. Businesses don't want to train you if they can help it. Not able to find a learn-on-the-job opportunity? Take the author's advice and contribute to an interesting open source project.

2. Befriending an employee of one of the largest ISPs in the United States ended up landing me a development position on a pretty large contract. I worked damn hard, and ended up contributing in a fairly visible way. Because the job was for a company in the Fortune 50 I've since been able to point to it as social proof that I at least have a vague idea of what I'm doing. Employers love this. This is when job hunting became dramatically easier.

You may think the takeaway here is to be lucky, but I disagree. The takeaway is to get to know people that you can develop mutually beneficial relationships with. To this day I still get contract work and referrals from people I worked with on that one job.

3. Location. Companies will sometimes relocate you, but I've never seen one that will do it without there being a very compelling reason to have you on staff (ie, experience and a proven track record). You have to go where the jobs are. Sometimes you have to suck it up, move away from your family and friends, become a nobody, and start pulling in a paycheck. Once you do you can start planning (and saving) for the luxury of living and working in a desirable place.

The takeaway here? Get away from the crowd. In my experience there are at least two good markets for developers, Denver/Boulder CO (Denver being easier than Boulder), and Kansas City MO/KS. I'm not a big fan of Kansas or Missouri (sorry natives, you're all great people), but Colorado is a beautiful place with lots to do outside your cube/apartment. The job markets in both those places are reasonable and you can be relatively well paid even with limited experience. How do they compare with SF/NYC? Not even close, but it's way easier to stand out from the crowd when there is no crowd. Being in the middle of nowhere can sometimes be a benefit.

All that said, good luck.

The only Archos device that is shipping and comparable to an Apple product (the iPad) is this: http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/02/archos-70-internet-tablet...

This is not something that can be easily compared to the iPad. Yes it is cheaper, but the two devices aren't the same. The three biggest (and easily measured) differences are the screen size, screen resolution, and storage. I can't find a price for the Achos 10.1, but please feel free to link it if you have it.

no one else can afford to match the iPad’s price with a comparably sized touchscreen display

See above and below.

iPods, iPhones, iPads. Across all of them, Apple’s prices are either comparable, or lower, than their competition.

The other Archos devices available for sale are indeed cheaper, but also fail to have comparable specs to the Apple devices.

Juxtaposing the iPad with a smartphone in an attempt to compare the prices doesn't seem right (you linked to an HTC A8181, but mentioned the Galaxy S). Did you mean to compare it to the Tab?

It is my humble opinion that children should be slowly, slowly introduced to technology. The first example that comes to mind is my own introduction to a pocket calculator in the late 1980's. I was given one before I had been exposed to the intermediate concepts of mathematics and looking back it hurt much more than it helped as it immediately became a crutch. I became more interested in getting the problem done than learning from the experience.

A slow and methodical approach to learning is what works best for me, and may not be optimal for everyone. Laying the right foundation is pretty much the only way to excel, and given the perverse incentives that abound in (America's) public schools you need to pretty much accept that it's up to you to make this happen for your child. As someone who didn't have it I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a parent that is intensely interested in helping you build from simple concepts to the advanced, learn how to learn, and how to think critically about everything you encounter. Having someone there to help you cope with the anxiety of being a novice (at life and learning) is worth more than I can express. Making sure your child understands the core of a concept before he or she has access to tools that shortcut and accelerate its use is paramount.

Also, don't be disappointed if they want to write, sculpt, draw, or paint all day. We need artists too.

Good luck.

I've met a number of ex-Googler "suits" and have never been impressed by those guys. They don't shy away from boasting about their time there and what they supposedly added to the organization as a whole. The experiences have made me wonder if the business types have started to sour the culture. Any current or former employees care to weigh in?

Addendum: Let me add that I have nothing against business people as a whole. I (anecdotally) find that large groups of technically competent people tend to weed out assholes from their ranks somewhat more effectively than large groups of strictly business/management people.

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1708328

http://demandprogress.org/blacklist/

I've donated a little money and would encourage you to do the same.

The recent praise full-screen applications got at the 10.7 sneak peek doesn't resonate with me, but perhaps it will with others. What I want are applications that intelligently manage screen real estate themselves. My thoughts on this are still somewhat unpolished, but what I'd really like to see is automatic management based on need and importance. Clear, standard notifications (and as few as possible), cooperation between apps when two or more run on the screen, and a clear way to navigate between them. All the while there would be no title bars or min/max/close buttons to be found.

This isn't a call for more iOS in OS X (although it seems to be going that way) so much as it is a call to acknowledge the limitations of user ability and patience. It's something I think about a lot.

Let's get down to brass tacks. Nobody says you have to buy an Apple computer (and the author of this post points out that he doesn't have one). We're done here, right? Not quite.

Picking through the ranting what I think I see is someone who's upset about Apple's success and what they're doing with their market inertia. It was pretty much a given that if the App Store for iOS took off there would be an App Store for OS X. If we were in a pirate movie right now we'd call that a "parlay." Apple has done a lot of things right if your metric is strictly financial success. Where people seem to be incredulous is that (although highly subjective) Apple has also done a lot of things right when it comes to user/consumer experience. Nerds are not the primary audience for Apple's products. My parents, grandparents, and people who are more interested all things non-technical are. An App Store on OS X (and the existing one of iOS) is good for the two parties most important to Apple, normal users and Apple.

If you feel strongly about how this has shaken out then I challenge you to ask yourself, "why?". There are tons of ready-made excuses along the lines of "openness", "freedom", and "I don't like guys in turtle necks." None of them really matter. The problem of how non-technical people find and install computer software is decades old. As designers and developers we've largely left that problem to platform developers, sales, and marketing people. Now someone has come along and placed a viable solution into the mass market all while creating the potential to make a tidy profit. We call this capitalism.

1. The Finder is going to change. What is becomes I don't know, but I think the filesystem will be further downplayed as Apple tries to take its vision of user friendliness even further. This is the possibility.

2. Window management goes away. Imagine software that didn't need its UI sorted and resized. Personally I hate even thinking about where something should rest on a screen. Given that there are tons of legacy applications out there that use windows in a variety of ways I don't see this happening. This is the dream.

-- Edit:

Graphics drivers that are on par with Windows should probably be added to the "dream" category.

Reminds me of that old Mitch Hedberg joke, "You will either hate us or love us... or you'll think we're ok."

Were you the kind of kid who had their Christmas morning ruined because you had to wait 364 days for it to happen? Everyone groaned when the AT&T exclusivity agreement was announced, but widely understood that it would be years before you could get the phone on another carrier. I'd argue that while it was a polarizing move, publicized exclusivity actually helped the sales of the iPhone. You either accepted that you'd have to use AT&T and got the phone regardless of the service, or you didn't. Anyone waiting with baited breath for a second carrier in the US was either ignorant, stupid, or both. The options were clear. Now that exclusivity is about to be over there is a second wave of adoption coming. Why? Because the things that made the phone worth buying to begin with are still there, and the only deal-breaker for most people is going away. Everyone who "needed" an iPhone already has one. Everyone who "likes" the iPhone is about to have it be an option.

I would love to see the facts supporting your hypothesis that, "AT&T gave up its exclusivity deal with Apple for the iPhone back in the spring of this year. Verizon and other insiders had to have known well in advance that they were going to. They should have been ready for a release in July, at the latest." You're making assertions about the strategy for the next phase of one of the most popular consumer electronic devices ever, and you're backing them up with the word "should."

One has to wonder how much the ranks of computer science programs everywhere would swell if the other half of this supposed rock star equation were present. Orgies, copious narcotics, groupies, press coverage, and throngs of adoring fans? For an office job? Shit yeah, I'll learn everything von Neumann ever day-dreamed about. Worst case scenario I can take my girlfriend out to the beach and write her a little PHP script that outputs a screed indicating my level of interest (over HTTP), right?

I actually have a friend whose design shop has been doing this for a while. It really drives the point home.

The issues with getting large corporations to finally upgrade are moot. The consumer/home user is already abandoning IE6 because people like us are advising them to. Large companies aren't going to incur the cost of an upgrade until they have to. They don't have to as long as people keep supporting IE6. With the current amount of web traffic coming from IE6 hovering around 12% (last time I checked) it really depends on whether or not an organization needs to reach those visitors with an experience that is on par with users of other browsers. Putting a price tag on it is perfect.

http://www.isapirewrite.com/

More here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60857/mod-rewrite-equival...

It's interesting that CMS specific sites were even proposed. In my experience (mostly with the Drupal community) CMS advocates tend to be pretty tribal and desire a narrow focus. A cross-CMS Stack Exchange site would probably seem like it was full of noise to everyone involved. What would deemed to be signal VS noise would depend entirely on one's CMS of choice.

They're limited in that they don't have the same abilities as professionally produced games. What I'd like to see is a leveling of the playing field when it comes to online digital game distribution for consoles. Restricting some of the system's abilities (ala iOS, etc) is naturally going to happen, but anything a professional title can do, my (hypothetical) game should be able to do as well.

There are also a lot of interesting possibilites for streaming video, etc like what you're starting to see on iOS devices. The situation for content might be a little sticky considering that MS does its own distribution deals. At the very least opening the field up to smaller shops and lowering the barriers and costs to entry would be a huge step in the right direction and MS would still get a cut as the apps/games would be bought with Microsoft points.