I'm mystified by 'blame the victim' tone of your comment.
Does any old lady deserve to be taken advantage by scumbag lawyers or accounts?
1,904 karma · joined December 23, 2009
Does any old lady deserve to be taken advantage by scumbag lawyers or accounts?
Blaming Apple or Microsoft for not willing to put VP8 in their browser or for not willing to donate h.264 patents to public pool would be obviously crazy.
Let's blame the one party that actually does something positive for web video.
Apple and Microsoft has been waging anti-android patent war for ages, suing HTC, Samsung, Barns&Noble and many other Android manufacturers.
They are publicly pro-patents and when they are failing in the marketplace are suing anyone who poses a threat to their business.
Google is publicly against patents, releases a lot of source code under Apache license that grants patent rights and, as far as I know, haven't launched an offensive patent suit (i.e. against someone who hasn't sued them first).
The Motorola lawsuits that Gruber (and quite a few anti-Google people) is so keen to quote happened years before Google acquired Motorola.
At this point I don't even understand why people expect Google to just take it and not launch offensive against Apple and Microsoft. You can be pro-peace but if someone points a gun at you and shoot, you shoot back and that's what Google should do: shoot back.
Your problem is that the success depends on execution.
We do know that there is market for good educational software. Many successful apps already validated that.
If you write one more good educational software, chances are you'll be successful.
However, chances are that your software will not be good in which case no success for you.
Another problem is that you might be trying to bite more than you can chew. The idea of comprehensive software product is good but if you try to build that as your version 1.0, you'll likely fail. Start small and build on your successes.
They price their premiums so that they always make a profit, regardless of the risk.
That's why drivers that have accidents pay more than drivers with no accidents and young drivers (that are statistically more risky) pay more than not-young drivers.
Insurance companies will simply adjust the cost of insurance for self-driving cars to account for risk based on past data. If those cars will turn out to be involved in less accidents, the insurance will cost less. More accidents => cost more.
They do have designers and program managers whose job is to decide which submitted ideas should be implemented and which should be discarded (and I'm sure a majority is discarded).
In fact, listening to your users (as compared to just doing things you think are good) is the basic idea of Lean Startup and other agile methodologies.
You're not supposed to put users in a driver's seat but you are supposed to listen to their feedback.
Apple's weakness is that they don't listen to users (or at least I don't know of a channel where my feedback would be likely to catch Apple's PM attention). I understand the challenge of trying to listen to users at Apple's scale and they're extraordinarily successful regardless, but it doesn't mean that you can't get meaningful feedback and meaningful ideas from your user base. Xiaomi is a proof that it's possible.
Etsy (http://codeascraft.com/2011/02/04/how-does-etsy-manage-devel...) and just about any web dev shop disagrees with you.
There's nothing different about hardware.
In fact there's a story about a guy who build human-powered airplane not by planning harder but by increasing the frequency of iterations (http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663488/wanna-solve-impossible-p...).
This is exactly the idea behind Xiaomi's hardware and software efforts: improve faster by learning faster from more frequent iterations. Apple can only learn if their stuff works every year. Xiaomi can learn something every week.
I think comparing them to Apple on the basis of sold phones in China is justified.
Looking into my crystal ball, I further think that their strategy is so brilliant and their execution is so good that we're witnessing the rise of a new giant.
Give it 5 years and they'll be in the same league as Apple and Samsung on a world-wide basis, not just in China.
On odesk you hire people for projects of limited time.
He didn't mean that you don't pay the people you've hired if they do the work they promised - that will get you kicked out of odesk really quickly.
What he does mean by "gentle fire" is "don't hire them again for more work".
And that's how it's supposed to work: odesk freelancers have no right to expect being hired by you for second job if they didn't perform to your satisfaction on their first job, for which they were paid the amount they agreed to be paid (just to make this clear).
In fact, since you can't afford to pay anyone to do it for you, you have to do marketing yourself.
Writing a decent product website isn't that hard.
For motivation, start by reading http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/10/16/marketing-hacking-t...
Then learn the basics of marketing (it's not rocket science) and apply the things you learn in practice.
The story that I've read was that IBM had the hardware but didn't think they could make software on time so they went shopping for the OS. First they went to Digital Research who didn't want to do it. Microsoft jumped in and promised to deliver what would become MS-DOS. The rest is history.
In no way was Gate's mother instrumental in the process.
Citation: http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/software/286148-the-rise-of...
You gain nothing and to many it's unprofessional.
People that are in demand are programmers and good programmers code 90% of time. Some people, including yourself, suggested graphics but read the history of DOOM and read its source code: despite being a cutting edge technology at the time, 90% of the code is the non-math drudgery: reading and writing files, networking code, performant array and string classes, making the code cross-platform and cross-compiler, debugging code etc. Carmack certainly knows his math but he knows his C even more.
Math might be helpful/necessary in some fields but if you're thinking about being a programmer (as opposed to academic/researcher), don't expect math to be more than 10% of your time. The rest is the same drudgery that the rest of us has to deal with on a daily basis.
I actually did write a fair amount of Go code (my primary languages are C++ and Python).
On real, non-toy programs it is significantly more concise than C++, in the ballpark of Python code.
This isn't visible on code snippets (less than 500 loc) like the toy raytracer, but trust me: you'll see a big difference on 10k loc codebase.
Then write some more code.
That's how you learn to program.
Don't waste your time debating the "best" resource. Pick up OReilly book and learn everything in it. Follow an on-line tutorial. Complete treehouse projects.
DO something. Anything. Starting now, for 8 hours a day.
Anything else is just procrastination.
1. Yes, it is extremely tough to make money selling iOS apps. App Store creates power law dynamics where Top 10 apps make as much money as the rest of the apps combined. If you're in Top 10 then congrats, but most likely you won't be. Median App Store revenue is few hundred dollars per month. iOS programmers are in demand today. It's much easier (and in most cases more profitable) to sell your iOS expertise for $100/hr than make apps yourself.
2. People make money both in games and apps. So can you.
3. There is not such thing as too much marketing. Try every marketing technique that you can think of and can afford.
At the same time, no amount of marketing can rescue a bad app so you need to track conversion rates of your marketing efforts.
4. Free with ads vs. paid depends on your app. If you believe people will pay than go paid. If you don't, then free with ads but you have to be realistic: ad based business requires lots of volume so if your app is not in the "useful for lots of people" category, ads will not make you rich.
In general, if you want to learn a new language, pick a project of limited scope (weeks) that you have done in the past in some other language.
A database is a bad choice. Even the simplest database worth being called a database requires months of effort.
Unfortunately, the app seems to fall into "build it but they won't come" category i.e. lacking product-market fit.
I used to be a student and I don't remember planning activities being a significant problem.
Another problem is that you have no monetization strategy. If your app is not free, no-one will use it and it obviously requires massive adoption to be useful.
Even if it gets massive adoption, then what? Will you put ads in the app?
How will you keep getting new users to offset the loss from people finishing college?
You have a chicken-egg problem when it comes to adoption, built-in 4-year churn and very few options to make money. It might be a useful app but a terrible business.
One such improvement would be to publish all this information publicly in the first place.
The whole idea of FOIA requests is broken - it only exists to compel the government to disclose the information that they are legally required to disclose but don't feel like it unless someone takes the time to specifically request it.
This program is completely voluntary for publisher - they have to sign up for it explicitly, Amazon can't just force their hand.
Also, it's the publisher who sets the price (from the limited set of 2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free).
Source: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-ne...
Notice that the big US publishers are not yet mentioned as participating.
"everybody" in this context means "large numbers of people who can't afford high-end hardware"
Google was talking about those optimization plans during last I/O, I believe.
People say stack ranking is bad within Microsoft because you're not ranked against all 50k+ employees but against 10+ people that report to the same manager.
If 2 out of 10 people are guaranteed low ranking, then it's better to be a mediocre programmer in a team of poor programmers than to be a very good programmer in a team of even better programmers.
It also means that it makes sense to sabotage the performance of your 9 colleagues because you only care about looking better than them, not about doing best possible job for the company or your team.
A global stack ranking, if it was actually possible, would be great. You do want to get rid of low performers (and hire better replacements) and in a large enough pool the bottom 20% will really be worth replacing with better people.
What you shouldn't do is to hope that anyone will pay you.
The first person who pays can offer exactly the same thing for $0.
It's impossible to convince anyone that they should pay you even $1 if exactly the same thing is available for $0 from somewhere else.
The ability to charge for GPL software is purely theoretical. In practice, you can't.
Do they think they can just implement new web APIs without first discussing them with W3C and other browser vendors like Microsoft or Apple?
It's a testament to how good V8 is that char-by-char loop is faster in JavaScript than optimized C code but if you were to benchmark pre-V8 JavaScript interpreters or current implementations of Python or Ruby, regex matching would smoke char-by-char loop written in the language simply by virtue of being C code.
It is, however, an exception to the rule.
Computer industry is littered with bodies of slain giants: Borland, Sybase, Lotus, Wordstar, Personal Software (VisiCalc) etc. The rest are companies that stabilized into a success (Oracle, eBay, Microsoft).
It's exceedingly rare to make a come back (IBM, Apple are 2 examples I can think of).
Another difference is that a custom algorithm for compressing integers might gain speed/compression efficiency from exploiting statistical properties of integers e.g. it's a safe bet that in most cases the highest byte of an int is 0 (i.e. integers are are small).
Or in many cases a delta encoding is very effective (i.e. {5, 10, 15} => {5, 5, 5} which is easily encoded with run-length encoding).
Of course if integers are randomly and uniformly distributed they are just as un-compressible as random, uniform distribution of bytes, but in many real-life uses of integer arrays that is not true.
Because Python is slow, Python is not used in scenarios where speed is crucial. That much is true.
However, if Python was faster, it would be used in those scenarios, so more people would be using it for speed critical code so it would provide real gains for a great many Python programmers.
This is exactly what happened with JavaScript: before V8 JavaScript was in exactly the same position as Python. Not many people were writing large programs in JavaScript because JavaScript was too slow. V8 sped up JavaScript 10x+ and people started writing much larger apps that do require that speed. If JavaScript speed suddenly dropped to pre-V8 speeds, we would all find the most popular web apps unusably slow.
If only there was a system where you could call a cab exactly to where you are, monitor its position while it arrives in real time, and one that would drop you off exactly where you wanted to go. A system where you could comment on the quality of the driver after each ride so that the bad ones are permanently kicked off.
Wait, there is. It's called Uber.
In this case self-regulation and competition work better than government regulations. Uber has self-interest in making sure they work well or else people will move to a better system.
Having government erect and then enforce the laws is a costly externality of the taxi system - police officers are paid with your money too.
Is this a Bruce Lee thing, an argument without an argument?