Everyone offended with everything and everyone reading about what they should be offended about in a media outlet using one liners suggesting that they should be remembered for a clothing choice rather a scientific achievement all so that in future some groups can maintain moral superiority via public humiliation for their own agendas.
Edit: Oh diddums I upset the PC squad.
Edit 2: Oh the maturity. Some of my other posts have been downvoted at the same time.
Yeah. I believe in the free speech argument and all, but considering that:
1) in the technology in general but also in astronomy the women are a minority.
2) in almost every field the women are paid less for the same job.
3) He was representing the elite in the world of science.
So I think that you might be right that today we are haunted by the hater speech so "Everyone offended with everything" might be true and I probably agree to a certain point but is an over simplification.
If someone is offended is in his/her right claim an apology. If he is a good man with good will and made a mistake say sorry is a great gesture.
Now. I'm particularly worried that there are people offended by certain facts and do not care by some aspect of the reality.
1. Have you asked any women who aren't in these specialist areas why they aren't or have you read the arguments by the politicians and (I hate using the word) extremists? I have listened to both sides. Women aren't in tech because as a general rule, it's not interesting to them. Both sexes have different motivations. It doesn't mean they cant do it.
2. Yes you're probably right. All out engineers bar two are male. All our QA team bar two are female. QA get paid less than engineering because the role demands less, not because they are women. I'll say that the women have a better memory and attention to detail and the programmers have more patience and work better together.
3. No he wasn't. He was representing himself.
Fed up of this argument. Its horse shit propagated by a few people.
Throwing some science into it, if we weren't specialised into genders we would be hermaphrodites. We're not equal and that's why the majority of us form couples and step forward together.
1)I didn't discus with many girls/women why/why not choose a scientific or IT career. In fact I didn't discuss that with many men/boys.
I'm studying Computing Engineering and as far I know there are between 2 women for 8 men or 3/7 at best (usually, it could be better or in some classes there are none).
Assume that "is that way because it is" it's strange. Considering how many women I know use technology and are gamers this turns to be strange because the penetration of technology is almost equal in both genders. Yeah I know more techno savvy boys than girls but why.
I could argue about mechanics/electricity engineering that there is something there. For example I don't know many women that love cars or planes but I (and probably my bias, I) know many guys whom are into that.
Then it's strange that boys like technology better, but we are exposed equally...
When Kid I played CS tournaments and girls where pretty rare (I don't remember a single one). I was surprised recently by the number of women playing games as Lineage, it turns they are more than when I played CS, but there are scarce yet.
In the other hand, there are many girls I know whom play Sims, pokemon, Sim City, PES, and Guitar Hero... (not mentioning games as Farm ville).
So they might play different games, but they play games as frequently as men. So this puzzle me.
2)Rationalization does not help. Sometimes that turns into an excuse that keeps justifying a bad habit. It is a reality.
3)I have the opposite though. The whole team didn't receive the same exposure, if that was the case I would totally agree, but he was representing people whom wasn't there.
For the last part I know we are different. I'm not saying we must be equal. That's not the point. If you are saying that there are less women in technology because they are not into for unspecified reasons then I don't know what to say.
And please don't claim because science when neither me nor you gave any scientific reason for our postures.
I think to be honest that some of the stuff Microsoft have been working on behind the scenes is probably scaring the crap out of Apple and Google. There's not been a platform as holistic and complete as Microsoft's offerings so far and they are adding REAL value daily rather than just moving the chess pieces to great fanfare.
One thing has for me: people are spending lots of money on them. Top slicing that is pretty easy.
Oh and most problems are solved or canned so all we're doing is gluing things together and making it look pretty (which is what programming via abstractions is all about).
I would rather say it has become apparent over the last year. I say windows 8 marks the moment.
That's where Microsoft realized they needed to garner goodwill and at that point Google had so much global market share (web traffic, browsers, mobile) they could say fuck all to everything and anyone.
And they started doing just that. Anyone else remember the forced and sneaky adaption tactics that was Google+?
I would say on Microsoft's part it was when Ballmer was ousted and Nadella took the reins. Nadella seems to be genuinely open to working with instead of against other companies and open source projects. I think he realized the ship was sinking, and he's doing what he can to save it, throwing out old and dead business practices in the process.
I actually like the "new" Microsoft and the direction it's heading, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around that fact.
Ballmer was at the helm when this train started rolling. It has taken years to get here. When Hanselman said to Miguel, "We did it." on stage at dev connect, I took that to mean something much larger than open sourcing Core.net. There has been a push from within on open-sourcing and pivoting on their approach to many of their lines of business that has taken so many people so many small battles, that I would sya Satya's ascendancy was the coming out party for a movement vs. some catalytic event.
You're right of course, these changes didn't happen with the flip of a switch. It just seems that so much good has happened at/from Microsoft in the relatively short time since Nadella took over, it's almost as if that was the moment the shackles were taken off. Obviously the ground work was laid when Ballmer was still in charge, but it was almost as if he resisted the changes that were coming down the pipe to the very end.
Google still open sources their apps. That's why there's almost always two versions of each app on Android. Messenger versus Hangouts. Google also allows you to remove ANY AND ALL information they have on you that is used to target advertisements. Google also allows you to export ANY AND ALL data you use in their services and to import it to any other service you choose.
Are both versions of their apps open source and do they have equivalent features? Second question (maybe based upon old info) but I thought deleting email from GMail does not really delete the email which is retained for Google's purposes? These are sincere questions and not intended to be rhetorical.
Equivalent features that are not tied into Google services? Yes. Messenger does MMS/SMS. So does Hangouts. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that specific services (Voice calling over GTalk) should require the specific app (Hangouts)
And no, Google does not keep emails. After 30 days you cannot recover anything.
>If you can't find your messages in All Mail, Spam, or Trash, or by performing a search, then they've been permanently removed from Gmail, possibly deleted by someone else. We regret that we are unable to recover messages that have been permanently deleted.
I can confirm that having emails permanently deleted, such as when I unsubscribed from mailings from a store I deleted my account from... I stopped receiving advertisements in the sidebar related to that store. When you stop getting ads about specific things after deleting all emails about those specific things, I would say that's fairly conclusive.
That's not going to happen any time soon. Not because they don't want to but because the whole process would be monumentally complicated and expensive.
I suspect we'll see a new 100% managed code IDE in the next 3-5 years that will fit this area nicely. It'll have bits of Visual Studio in it and it may even be called Visual Studio but it won't be what we have now.
Are you confusing "Visual Studio 2015 ... uilding applications that run on platforms including Windows, Linux, iOS and Android." with "Visual Studio 2015 will run on"?
I was confusing "cross-platform" with "runs on", yeah. I thought that as Ars says Visual Studio is cross platform, that it would mean it runs on multiple platforms. A closer read indicates that may not be true.
I'm with you. The day Google announced Inbox, and the fact that it wouldn't work with Firefox, was the day I finally got motivated enough to set up my own email server. I ended up just using mail-in-a-box, which doesn't come with the _best_ client, but is good enough, and I can use it from any browser I want without any problems.
Well, yes, that'd be nice if we had a "interoperable universal interaction standard." But now the majority (and soon, almost everyone) will be using the internet on tiny personal computers (smartphones) that run native apps. Using a web browser will become less and less important or even relevant. In such a case the costs of optimizing for multiple run-times makes little sense. Really, abandoning the browser for native apps (in the old days we called them "programs") across the board makes more sense, and leave browsers to what they were originally intended for - document perusal and simple data collection.
And web browsers absolutely suck at UI for applications. Imagine the man hours and effort that went into building Gmail. It boggles the mind. Who would even want to maintain that?! All for something that could have been created as a native app much easier. There's a lot of reasons that people have gravitated towards apps on phones, but one of them is assuredly that the experience is better than using a web browser.
As someone who is old enough to have written "programs" and sees the instant relationship to "apps", I vigorously disagree. Lets consider these points:
1. Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs. This means there is little common ground between the three major sectors of the market. You either have to pick one and lose market share or pick all and increase cost. Nothing (yet) has solved this problem adequately without increasing cost or decreasing agility and/or quality and consistency.
2. Each of these platforms has many barriers to entry from subscription fees, having to buy specific hardware and learn how to use it, distribution and vendor costs, QA cost and the risks of rejection and having your product closed suddenly.
3. All of the markets are primarily consumer oriented which makes deploying things to corporate entities a pain in the backside requiring more hoops to jump through.
4. None of the programs have longevity, a stable platform to run on, security guarantees or predictable security evolution.
So at the end of the day, you're pitching programs sold behind a walled garden by someone who wants a slice of your cash and doesn't give a fuck if the device works after you've sold it versus a platform with zero entry cost, total ubiquity and importantly absolutely no distribution or sales model at all so you can build your own?
Nope.
People take apps because they're cheap, free or the vendor is pushing them. That's it. If it wasn't the case, the first thing we'd do when we unboxed a mac or a PC was download and install facebook. Which we don't do.
You make some excellent and valid points, to which I don't necessarily disagree. I just think the inertia is towards the use of native apps over web browsers as delivery mechanisms for software - both mobile and PC.
A couple of points:
"Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs."
I see the major web browser as those competing platforms. The effort to make something work on different web browsers is huge, almost, or equal to, the difficultly of choosing a cross platform development tool and targeting multiple OSes.
"...the first thing we'd do when we unboxed a mac or a PC was download and install facebook".
A native facebook application might be pretty cool. Really, do I do something much different when I use Thunderbird and eschew Gmail?
> and doesn't give a fuck if the device works after you've sold
Which is even worse on the web, where most of the time that someone also doesn't give a fuck about you at all and will just pull the product the moment he gets enough users to make an exit.
There are good things about having a working binary on your device; the author can't just take it away from you just because he doesn't care about the product anymore.
There are good things about having a working binary on your device; the author can't just take it away from you just because he doesn't care about the product anymore.
Tragically, in the modern software world, that often isn't true either.
Buggy junk gets shipped routinely even when people are paying real money for it. Software developers assume you'd love to have their regular updates, even if those updates also change interfaces and modify or even outright break/remove functionality however they feel like. If you don't apply the updates, you don't get security fixes either, so for any software that is at all involved with sharing data or communicating on-line many users have little choice. The idea of long term support for any stable software that people actually rely on is a joke for many projects. And that's before we even get to all the DRM/activation junk.
Ironically, the worst offenders are probably Chrome and Firefox. IME, the next worst offenders are often the supposedly high-end professional software that comes with a thousands-of-dollars-per-seat price tag -- assuming you can even buy a copy instead of renting it these days.
I'm mildly optimistic that a new generation of software seems to be arriving where people are expected to pay for good work but the prices are much more reasonable: not App Store peanuts, not Enterprice Pricing (call for a quote, because hell will freeze over before we publish any useful information publicly). A lot of these tools are relatively small or specialised, but they do their jobs well, they get very favourable feedback from users, and they have real, commercially viable development organisations behind them. Also, they rarely incorporate the user-hostile junk. So good work can still be done commercially, and of course for some of the important geek-friendly software like development tools and OS/server/networking infrastructure there are Open Source projects that are usefully stable, reliable and comprehensive. I look forward hopefully to a day when these kinds of projects are the norm for software we rely on, and we can all get on with using our computers without constantly fighting with them.
>And web browsers absolutely suck at UI for applications.
I prefer web apps to native apps. Day to day, at work, our CRM, bug/issue/project tracker, document management, help-desk software, phone system management, knowledge base, email, document/spreadsheet software are all web-based. Historically, those were all native 'programs' (as late as mid 2000s) and they were all crap.
>All for something that could have been created as a native app much easier.
I don't know about that. Some things are easier with html/css/js than with a native framework, but it's not just about developer comfort. Web applications provide huge benefits to users over native apps - that's why we're willing to deal with the development stack (which is getting better every year).
>Imagine the man hours and effort that went into building Gmail.
It's probably not that bad. Writing maintainable web code isn't that hard these days.
>There's a lot of reasons that people have gravitated towards apps on phones
Yes. It all really boils down to performance. If you could get 60fps with a web-app on mobile (which in principle you should achieve), I don't think users would care. You'd also see an even bigger uptake of webview-based 'native' apps (a la phone gap).
I use gmail everyday on my phone and have not bothered with downloading its app. It is pointless as I get a good enough experience on the browser and I do not want to deal with updates.
And native apps are good for things like Microsoft Office or things you expect to use offline and frequently. But if you make me download an app for Facebook or gmail and get me to update it every now and then, I will get pretty annoyed.
Well, I do use GMail off-line all the time - this (+ less crappy UX) is the reason I keep the app. Being able to browse and send e-mails shouldn't require being constantly on-line.
I've spent the last 8 months working on my own stuff. Before that I worked primarily as a backend engineer. My UI experience was limited. I did see the need for the skills.
I also believe that there should be at least a strong mobile offering with any web application now-a-days. That said, here's my thought on the matter.
UI sucks for everything. It really seems to have always sucked and probably will continue to suck. Swing is a pain to develop. WinForms too. I assume from looking at Cocoa code, so is Apple.
I've been working on a Pomodoro app during this whole time. Just getting lists to work efficiently in Android is a bitch. You have to serialize objects in and out of view items to make sure scrolling doesn't absolutely crap out when you've got a lot of items. Even with Swift, the same is fundamentally true in iOS.
Making a native app that looks 1) unique and 2) nice is terrible. You have to have a team with a designer and developer. Anything less and you're going to be out of the market longer. Making a native app that meets the two criteria above on multiple platforms is incredibly time consuming.
So I've now decided to use Ionic + Angularjs + Cordova. I've been on that platform for 2 weeks now. In that time, I've learned Web SQL, Angularjs, Ionic and enough Cordova to get plugins installed. I am also further along than I ever was in my Android development. It even looks pretty using the default Ionic styling (I got a free UI team by using their stuff).
So even if I accept your speculation that apps will dominate the world. I assume it will be developed on an HTML5 or HTML* stack. That does require "interoperable universal interaction standards".
I'll continue this speculation to say that I think the appearance of apps will merge. There is little reason to have a brand for Android and a brand for iOS and a brand for Tizen, etc. Ionic apps look like Ionic apps without having to spend a lot of GUI logic saying stupid things like, If Android, put the tabs on the top. Again, you need a common standard for this type of design and that is HTML.
P.S.
I know that games will suck in JS in the browser view. I know that JS has some serious issues with performance that will probably not be overcome for sometime. I've seen that analysis blog post too. But for CRUD apps like the Pomodoro or Foursquare or LinkedIn, Ionic and its ilk are perfect. The reason is, to beat the horse, is because of advancing open, compliant standards. CSS animations can now be hardware accelerated. JS performance is constantly improving (even if it is a horrible, horrible language).HTML is being banged out to house newer features. This isn't a polemic about how native has no values. It's a polemic against the idea that CRUD apps should have gone native.
This. to quote my father (who is actually a professional photographer): Pissy lens; pissy photo.
You need chunks of glass at the moment regardless of sensor size. I carry a basic DSLR around with me (D3100) and a decent but cheap lens (AF-S DX 18-55) and a shit smartphone. They cost less than a good smartphone and the results are amazing.
I was under the impression that there are basically not enough photons at the sizes that most smart phones sensors are. Once you get to low light levels a tiny sensor just can't be fed enough photons to give a good picture.
Sure. The more glass you have the more photons you can gather. I have a f1.2 50mm lense and the amount of photons it can pull in is amazing. There is no way any phone is going to be able to replicate this.
Definitely. I've got a centos 6.5 VM that is a master svn server for a multinational with a 22Gb repo and 190 users and does front end http and ssl for 45 requests/second (average with peaks of 200/sec) and it barely touches the CPU (single 3.2 GHz xeon e5 core) and has only 1Gb of RAM.
I'll add something here. The CLR is a PITA when it goes wrong. Its a total bastard to debug. JVM on the other hand has wonderful instrumentation capabilities at runtime.
At best you get a minidump out of a CLR process that is misbehaving and take it to bits inside VS. You may or may not catch it doing bad things. Most likely you'll find yourself with half the threads inside win32 and an 20 mins wait for symbol server to snag the symbols.
100000x this. While trying to track down a memory leak I discovered that while pretty much any guide out there on the internet points to using WinDg and referencing a Microsoft site for the symbol files, the .pdb doesn't actually exist.
That's of absolutely no use when the box is under heavy load. Perf counters just stop working.
We had a system wide thrashing problem with ReaderWriterLockSlim which doesn't work properly under load. Took 15 mins to log into the box to blast the process. Couldn't even get any performance info out of it. Happens on a JVM on Unix; no problem.
For ref the concurrent collections should not be trusted under heavy load in processes with more threads than CPUs. Its to be honest piss poor quality.
