To my mind, it's not a huge market, but purists definitely exist. Do they justify the cost? It seems worth analyzing, but it's definitely a big cost if you want to stay cross-platform but use native tools.
Much as I would like to give Gruber credit for asking about the developer relationship with the App Store at the top of the interview, the question really felt like a softball. I know he's got a relationship to preserve, but Hey is one hell of an elephant in the room to let pass without a follow-up question.
As an Iowan who has had the dubious pleasure of having used Shadow's software, I would like a lot of scrutiny directed at both Shadow and their software.
I worked as a Precinct Captain for one of the Caucuses in Iowa last night, and I didn't personally have any issues. But I heard from colleagues who definitely did. Also, yesterday we got an email with a 7-page google doc instructing us on how to reset the browser caches on our phones to avoid issues with data carry-over from the Mock Caucuses that we had been holding.
It's entirely possible that my ability to follow directions and my status as Not-an-Octegenarian-Caucus-Volunteer is all that kept me out of trouble.
As a software guy, all I can say for sure is that I'm overwhelmingly grateful that we kept paper backups so we don't have to rely on this software.
By way of talking my own book, I would note that the experience of having a big-screen tv, surround sound, and your PS4 on the plane is nothing to sneeze at.
As someone who puts in-flight entertainment systems in private jets, the only common thing I've seen in the ownership groups is an ability to afford the price tag. There are definitely a lot of buyers who are getting into this for time gains, but there are also buyers who are simply interested in privacy, luxury, or some peace and quiet. I ended up having to troubleshoot an in-flight issue on a ~$60 million private jet and the investment in sound-proofing insulation is totally worth it.
Large defense contracts tend to span large numbers of Congressional Districts in order to enable the sort of economic protectionism that keeps the F-35 and JTRS funded to the tune of billions of dollars, in spite of cost overruns and schedule deficiencies.
I would be shocked if this lead to significant site consolidation due to the backlash that this would cause from Congress. If anything, this will enable Raytheon (the company with more defense content) to use United Technologies facilities to create a larger network of appreciative Congressmen for large projects.
Mike Monteiro has a series of very opinionated (and highly-entertaining) presentations on this phenomenon, coming from the perspective of a designer. If what neilv is saying resonates with you, you owe it to yourself to check out the Designer Code of Ethics: https://deardesignstudent.com/a-designers-code-of-ethics-f4a...
Within the financial services industry, there are significant monetary incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with evidence of malfeasance. The SEC offers something like 0.5% of recovered funds, which can amount to millions of dollars... which is important because even with the protections afforded by Dodd-Frank, it's a very real possibility that you won't work in the finance industry again.
By contrast, while it might not be a permanent career-ending event for an engineer to blow the whistle at an engineering company, it holds the significant risk of ending the engineer's career at that company. Not to mention lawsuits and the cost of finding a new job. Most every engineer I know wants to do the right thing... but those are powerful headwinds. So on the mere suspicion of misfeasance or malfeasance, the prospect of losing a job and being embroiled in a lawsuit serves as a powerful deterrent.
People will point out (correctly) that adding financial incentives will inevitably lead to a combination of malicious compliance and misreporting, so there's a line that has to be drawn. Also, protections in private sector are either toothless or come with expensive oversight, but it's clear that if the government wants more whistleblowing from the ranks of normal engineers (and that's a big 'if'), they probably need to do something more to cause it to happen besides just keep asking.
Obviously going out of his way to implement in a secure way as a software practitioner. I would love to see a review of the design and implementation from the standpoint of a security expert.
100% agree. I feel that a lot of the commentary on this (mine included) has left out the fact that Smile is a classy company owned by a classy bunch of developers that have always done well by the community. They sponsor podcasts, they provide top-notch Mac/iOS apps, and they do excellent customer service. If they've changed their cost structure to $50/yr/customer, it doesn't reflect well on the App Store's monetization model.
TextExpander has always been straddling the markets of "casual consumer with $20 to spend on an app that reduces pain" and "professional customer willing to spend $199 to reduce major time costs." It looks like they've decided to focus on their professional customers... I hope that this works out well for them.
As someone who doesn't need $5/month of TextExpander services, this also leaves me in the market for a new solution.
Looking at your pricing structure and FAQ, it looks like a better approach would be to discriminate based on number of properties, raise your monthly rate and just make it unlimited paperwork... 1-2 properties a month at $19/mo, 3-5 at $39, 6-20 at $99 and then a "slumlord" option. (or something like that... obviously it's your business and you know your own costs)
Mostly, it seems unnecessarily fiddly to have entries in your FAQ about an average number of pieces of paper and special rates on processing paperwork backlogs.
I know way too many developers whose understanding of server infrastructure only extends as far as the API for S3. Marco's advice is dead-on: learn the nuts and bolts rather than becoming reliant on a leaky abstraction. You can always specialize to a specific cloud host after you understand the basics... much harder to go the other way if you've made your app reliant on Amazon or Rackspace-specific services.
Teaching falls into the same category as stage magic, stand-up comedy and writing - it looks easy and effortless when done by an expert because that's part of the expertise. Capturing attention, exciting young minds and engaging them is something that, when done effectively, is transparent because that's how it works best. The whole host of knock-on problems that are spawned by this apparent ease are well-documented in TFA.
"Now, I didn’t necessarily see the winning groups site, but you don’t have to – it was made in Dreamweaver!"
I want to believe that the arrogant tone in combination with this line are some sort of punch line or social experiment that I'm just not getting. Please?
The most frustrating part about this to me is the certain knowledge that all of the informed parties are quite happily cherry-picking statistics to serve a political narrative and the majority of reporters and analysts are unable to do any sort of deep analysis of the source material because it's all classified.
The mere availability of source documents elevates the conversation from a juvenile process of people hurling meaningless statistics at each other. In the absence of actual data and redacted filings provided by the government, leaked documents such as provided by Manning and Snowden take on a new life. Instead of just statistics without context, there are documents that illuminate a court of law that's basically been a secret up to this point. Obviously those documents selectively serve a narrative, but ironicaly, they're made even more powerful by virtue of the fact that they're the first substantive look that much of the public has gotten at the FISC.
In a world where journalists had unlimited research budgets and the time to run facts to ground, this sort of campaign to link Myhrvold's "good" name to his patent-trolling deeds would be unnecessary. But since we don't live in that world, I suppose the next best thing is to make sure to SEO Myhrvold's name so that it always turns up "scum", "patent troll", and "extortionist". Who knew you could do so much for journalism by priming the Google pump for future journalists?
To my mind, this sort of thing is a lot like crypto research. As a workman programmer, I know next to nothing about crypto algorithms so I can read the documents, but I can't provide much in the way of meaningful research. That said, I know that there are lot of interested crypto researchers out there who can provide meaningful analysis and who have an incentive to speak up if they find something. But on government-funded closed-source crypto algorithms, I have to take the NSA's word for it...
"For many folks outside of our community, the acronym SEO has (unfair) associations with spam or manipulation."
I'm not sure that the association is unfair. There are a lot of honest people out there plying the trade and doing good work in the SEO space, but the same could be said for email marketing. For every good guy, there's enough spammers out there that even now, guys like patio11 have to spend a decent amount of time spelling out the difference between legitimate email marketing and spamming. SEO strikes me the same way: lots of people doing good work and being drowned out by the negative press of snake oil salesmen, con men and link sellers.
It's unfair to the people doing the good work... but I don't think it's unfair that people free associate "email marketer" with "spammer" and "SEO Guy" with "Hucksters, Liars and Criminals". Too many run-ins with the Black Hat SEO crowd have made me wary and I'd be shocked if I was the only one.