I'm just about to pass my one-year mark as a software developer with Amazon, at Lab126 in Sunnyvale, California. I have never seen any restroom behavior like the sort this article described, either here or during my visits to the offices in Seattle. Where I come from, males don't speak in the restroom beyond a quick greeting. If someone did try to bring up business while I was in a stall, I hope I would politely suggest he continue the discussion at a more appropriate time (as opposed to me getting angry and saying something very rude and inappropriate).
I've also never seen a software developer bring his laptop into the toilet, but then I'll grant you that I'm focused on minding my own business when I'm in the restroom. In general, though, this seems a lot more like a place we go in order to take a break from work, rather than a place to catch up on it.
While I echo and amplify the disdain that Ronacher had for the code he cited in his article, I note that sarcasm doesn't work well online. There is of course nothing "cute" or "clever" about the sort of coding he showed. It is obviously very ugly and foolish, and I would've preferred the author be a bit more direct about this.
I think I'm sensitive to the inappropriateness of the words "cute" and "clever" regarding so much Javascript in the wild because of the decades I spent writing C++ in production environments. While I plodded through my share of big balls of mud, the ideal was always to produce code that was clear, maintainable, and extensible. Always think about the next coder down the line to look at your work, because that coder may be you; in six months time, what you wrote today may be almost completely unfamiliar to you.
I'm not seeing much of that sentiment in Javascript now. For the most part it seems to be written by a series of lone cowboys -- or rather, "ninja" -- who haven't considered that someone may one day need to do something else with their code.
Sometimes this is the result of laziness and amateurism, but I suspect that occasionally there are Javascript developers whose work truly qualifies as "cute" and "clever," or perhaps "too cute" and "too clever."
For instance, while I have a great deal of respect for John Resig of JQuery fame, I was mildly horrified by his book "Secrets of the Javascript Ninja." His code examples were undeniably clever, and demonstrated the profound understanding of Javascript that you'd expect. They would, however, often render production code nearly undecipherable and extremely difficult to debug at the very least. And of course there were always simpler, clearer ways to accomplish what he had done with "ninja" tricks.
So, to summarize, this article really just seemed to demonstrate ugly, foolish Javascript, whereas too cute, too clever Javascript is indeed a serious hazard.
Forgive the trivial comment, but did anyone else think of the recent controversy about the cleanliness and quality of the Soylent facilities when they read this article?
I'm astounded. Apparently the massive cruft and bloat of VS 2012 weren't enough -- they're actually issuing a VS 2013 that builds on a tool that has long since jumped the shark.
I have to thank Microsoft, though. It was the advent of both Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 that finally convinced me I needed to make my career independent of Microsoft products. I'd made the mistake of getting caught in the M$ rut in the late 1990s, and I've regretted it ever since. Visual Studio seemed like a fine tool for over a decade, I thought... and then the wake-up call of VS 2012 came like a kick in the teeth.
My professional focus has always been on desktop coding, with the web being just a hobby. Any web professionals out there want to comment on how Comcast plans on implementing this so-called "browser hijack?"
My clumsy first guess would be that the spyware-like term "browser hijack" is just hype for non-technicals. Comcast probably just plans on injecting a few lines of HTML into web pages coming back to a user. But wouldn't that mean they'd have to intercept, assemble, and evaluate all of the http response packets going to a particular IP, before letting them through? Sounds expensive and time consuming.
And then wouldn't that also be defeated by anyone who used one of the various web encryption schemes available? Surfing the web this way is slow, but it seems like Comcast is going to throttle part of your connection anyway.
I certainly agree that Woz seemed too weak, like the fat-kid character from a Judd Apatow film (so maybe they wanted Jonah Hill to play the part?). I don't know what Woz was like as a kid, but he seemed like a lot cooler guy when I saw him speak.
But then maybe that's how the scriptwriters viewed the Steve Jobs character -- they researched him in his polished adult form, and couldn't imagine him as someone younger and rougher around the edges.
I never thought I was looking at anyone but Ashton Kutcher. He wasn't playing Steve Jobs -- he was just emoting over the lines written to evoke Steve Jobs.
I must concede that neither my eyes nor my brain is good at processing visual information. The 48fps effect probably flew right over my head, and I struggled to interpret it the best I could.
I interpreted it to look like washed out, transparent videotape. Contrary to the article, I had a worse impression of outdoor scenes than indoor scenes; the outdoor scenes all looked cheap and cheesy and washed out to me.
Perhaps I was seeing too much. Perhaps the increased realism failed to mask the flaws in the special effects, as though we were back to the primitive CGI days of "Jurassic Park." The various nonhuman creatures all looked like laughable rubber monsters from an old "Dr. Who" episode.
But I recognize this as just one experience with 48fps, and I look forward to trying it again. I had far more trouble with the film's script and editing than I did with the cinematography.
I have never been clinically dead, but I have been drunk and I have had dreams.
Once when I was very, very drunk, I had the most brilliant idea anyone had ever conceived, or so I believed at the time. I remember thinking that this idea would change not just my life, but the lives of everyone on Earth. I remember feeling incredibly elated about this idea, as though I'd won the lottery, found the love of my life, and learned to fly like Superman all at once. Of course I carefully wrote down my idea and put it in a safe place.
The next day, after I sobered up, I pulled out my brilliant idea and read through it. As you've no doubt guessed, it turned out to be idiotic and nearly delusional. This wasn't just a near miss -- it was clearly the result of a dysfunctional state of mind. And yet I'd been convinced of my idea's transcendent properties.
Another time, I had a very difficult problem on the job and I went to bed that night with this problem nagging at me unbearably. The problem turned into a long, grinding dream about looking for various solutions and finding none. Then, in the middle of the dream, I mentioned the problem to a character who was a complete stranger to me. He proceeded to solve the problem for me, acting as though I was a total incompetent for not getting it myself. I became extremely jealous of this character, and did indeed feel incompetent.
This time when I returned to a fully conscious state of mind, the idea turned out to be correct, if mundane. I had the answer to my problem at work. But I still felt terribly ashamed for not being able to figure it out "by myself," and I still felt very jealous of the character in my dream who had solved it for me... even though both the character and the solution came from inside my own head.
The point of these two little anecdotes is only to suggest that beliefs are fueled by feelings, and feelings don't necessarily stem from reality. You can feel angry based on an imagined insult. You can feel that you're an expert on a subject even though you know nothing about it. You can feel that something is extremely important to you, even if it is demonstrably insignificant. And you can feel you had a profoundly real experience, even if you only had a hallucination.
I'm 50, I'm a proud software engineer, and I hope to be usefully employed as some sort of software engineer until the day I die.
I love what I do. I love the problem solving, the analysis, and the design. I love diving into a massive, tangled jungle of code and mastering it. I love taking a highly complex plan and turning it into living, breathing system. I love learning new languages, new libraries, new methodologies. Most of all, I love that "aha!" moment when a once-vague notion suddenly crystallizes to the point where I realize, "I can code that!"
And I love becoming a better software engineer. I've known and admired some truly brilliant programmers, and while I may never reach their level of knowledge and skill, I am damned well determined to try!
While I'm suspicious of the unsupported, anecdotal assertions in this article, I'm also confused by the author's use of the phrases "water soluble" and "fat soluble."
For instance, he states about Piracetam that "Being water soluble, it has a long half life in the system, but can take up to 6 weeks of daily dosing before full effects are apparent." And about Aniracetam, "A fat soluble racetam, meaning it is fast acting."
It's been several decades since I studied biochemistry, but I seem to recall exactly the opposite -- water-soluble substances were filtered out of the body through the kidneys with relative rapidity, while fat-soluble substances needed to be metabolized by the liver and tended to hang around quite a while. I just ran a very superficial web search on this topic, and found that the popular literature on vitamins and supplements seems to agree with my interpretation.
I'm a software engineer, not a biochemist, and I've read about some fairly tortuous biochemical pathways that turn what seem to be chemical likelihoods on their heads, so I could very easily be wrong in regard to nootropic substances. But if I'm not, isn't this basic error a warning sign that the author might be mistaken in other basic ways as well?
I'm just a humble senior developer in Phoenix, AZ, so my perspective is very limited. But for many years now I have been suspicious of this "talent crunch," of which so many have spoken.
I spent three months out of work earlier in the year, after being laid off suddenly from a company who was shedding developers at a rate of one per month. I currently work with another senior developer who was laid off from a defense contractor, and who sees his former colleagues being laid off regularly. I know of at least one brilliant former colleague who is desperately in need of a new position. I've observed a constant stream of unemployed or under-employed, talented software developers over my entire career; I can't simply dismiss it as anecdotal evidence.
My current employer has included me in his hiring process to some small degree, and what I'm seeing now doesn't seem to be a "talent crunch" so much as a "low-wage talent crunch." As a top-level developer at this company, I'm earning just an adequate salary, but my manager wants to pay substantially less to everyone underneath me, regardless of skills or experience. More than once, I have watched this repel talent I urgently needed in my group.
You don't always get what you pay for, my friends, but you never get more than what you pay for. Please consider this.
There seem to be many good observations in this article, but I feel as though the conclusions suffer because of superficiality.
The initial thesis that information "wants to be" reasonably priced rather than free is very quickly undermined by suppositions about why people pay for music: convenience, assurance of quality, legitimacy, etc. My point is that people aren't paying reasonable prices for information per se, but rather for these valuable intangibles.
In the main topic about newspaper paywalls, the author discusses how newspapers have realized they have "less fungible," more distinctive offerings, and people might be willing to pay for these. But again, it seems that potential customers aren't paying for information, but rather for distinctive voices which are again much less obvious than mere information.
In any case, I'm suggesting that before we degenerate into a battle of cliches about whether information wants to be free, economical, or pricey, we make certain that information is actually the commodity on the sales shelf. Mike Masnick at Techdirt.com frequently discusses the coupling of "infinite goods" (such as news, books, music, movies, etc.) with "finite goods" (which in the current examples might be convenience or distinctiveness, but could be anything from creator contact to t-shirts). In many cases, infinite goods seem to serve best as a advertising for finite goods.
I'm neither pro-Microsoft nor anti-Microsoft, but I must say that your take on this piece seems painfully, almost illogically slanted in favor of Microsoft.
>"For Microsoft, having a full featured reliable non-core product with measurable market share is a success because it allows Microsoft to offer vertical integration without the specter of anti-trust allegations"
One might rephrase at least part of this as, "For Microsoft, being a small fish in a large pond is a technicality that can be used as a distraction from what some view as its monopolistic goals."
>"Bing's robustness helps Microsoft sell software and services, while it's modest market share keeps infrastructure costs lower and Microsoft's core revenue stream coming from areas other than search reduces the pressure to game search algorithms towards their advertisers in order to increase revenue in the way that Google does."
Again rephrasing, "Bing was never meant to be a search engine, but rather a cheap, tame excuse for putting up a billboard about whatever Microsoft wants to sell."
>"What the article shows is not that Microsoft is inept, but rather that they are able to create an internal unit with many elements of a startup, scale that unit massively, and then transition it into a solid corporate structure capable of surviving over the long term"
That may in fact be the case, but it seems a rather forced spin on what the article's author seemed to be saying. To me, the narrative was about how Microsoft was large enough for a relatively small, startup-like project to remain below the radar until it began to develop some degree of success. At that half-baked point, it was noticed by the upper power bureaucracy, seized, and frozen before it could develop into a fully successful product. In an agile environment, this would have been fine (because the product wouldn't have been frozen), but since Microsoft is anything but agile, Bing became more of a legacy product than a living, growing project.
Of course, according to your earlier interpretation, this was all part of the Microsoft plan -- a pivot from "search engine" to "multiple distractions in the guise of a search engine."
Making money in a digital economy will (eventually) be a matter of linking scarce goods to infinite goods. The infinite item in this case was obviously the graphic novel. While physical copies are one example of a scarce item, they were given value primarily because of the true scarce item, engagement with the author.
I second this. While Banks may not be the most poetic of authors, his "Culture" series is excellent space opera. I'd enjoy living in this civilization myself.
Currently reading his 9th Culture novel, "Surface Detail," and liking it immensely.
If "piracy is preventing the market from establishing a real clearing price for books," doesn't that suggest perhaps the perceived market is illusory, or at least greatly misunderstood?
Effectively, the practice we bandy about as "piracy" (which is actually just file sharing) is a fact of the market. You can't stop it without causing far more problems than you solve. If someone wanted this particular novel, he or she could go to any of several sites and download it immediately, for free. Doesn't this suggest, then, that authors and/or publishers need to rethink exactly what they're selling, or what they need to be selling?
I'm merely suggesting that if you bring a product to what you believe is a market and then you make no money from it, shouldn't you be blaming yourself first?
Personally, I'm holding off because e-readers are too expensive. I want to read a book in the park, on an airplane, or in the bathroom. However, there's a real possibility that my e-reader might be forgotten or damaged in these locations. If this happens to a paperback novel, I'm only out a few dollars. With current e-readers, I'd lose hundreds.
I don't dispute Kurzweil's assertion that presentation is a major issue. Most e-readers are very annoying to me that way. But I might put up with this annoyance if I could get a decent device for $100 or less.
(Don't even worry about features like wifi -- just give me a USB port and let me load what I want.)
These are considerably more fun than the usual ideas, such as taking back future knowledge of the stock market, real estate trends, sporting events, or lottery numbers.
I appreciate mattheww's viewpoint. I take life very seriously, perhaps because I have only a finite amount of it. I read this site because I'm looking for a certain type of information, and I'm grateful to learn if a link does not contain that information.
I've also never seen a software developer bring his laptop into the toilet, but then I'll grant you that I'm focused on minding my own business when I'm in the restroom. In general, though, this seems a lot more like a place we go in order to take a break from work, rather than a place to catch up on it.