This, to me, is one of the most interesting topics of our time, and I find it fascinating the similarities (both philosophically and economically) to that of the railroads at the turn of the 20th century.
Much like net neutrality is the topic of the FCC, cargo neutrality on rail lines was the topic of the ICC [1] in their day. The problem of the early 1900s began with a bounty of riches in the highly competitive American Railway sector. Merchants using the railways were demanding "rebates" from railway companies for large shipments threatening to take business elsewhere and driving their shipping costs down. Of course, the same leverage was not available to smaller shippers, making their rates much higher and forcing them to raise the prices of their goods. The system was out of balance.
In 1903, congress and President Theodore Roosevelt, passed the Elkins Act [2], which eliminated rebates, but had the unfortunate side-effect of increasing price collusion between shippers and the railroads. The Elkins act did not establish a fixed rate, leaving interests to make deals that, again, were disadvantageous for smaller businesses. The only metric of discrimination was the diverting from a fixed railway schedule [3].
To correct the problems of the Elkins Act, the Hepburn Act was passed in 1906 greatly expanding the power of the ICC to regulate the Railroad Industry. The result was fixed prices on shipping deemed "just and reasonable" by the ICC, increased penalties for non-compliance, and an open and standard accounting system for the railroad companies. (As an aside, the depreciation of railway companies contributed to the Panic of 1907. A good word on that here: [4])
If all this back and forth sounds familiar, it is because we are facing the same problem today shipping bits that we were shipping coal and shirts all those years ago. The idea of prioritized delivery is not new or novel, but was dealt with before Netflix and Verizon began suing one another. What interests me is whether we will see legislation similar to the Elkins and Hepburn act for digital goods and services. I doubt very seriously that we will get fixed $/(Mbps) or $/GB mandates from the FCC, but already we are seeing definitions being made and lines being drawn [5]. There is already language from Wheeler about "responsibility to the 20 percent [without 25down/3up]", just as there was strong language from Roosevelt about the railway industries.
Foreign infrastructure funding has been going on for a while now in the form of toll roads. Particularly, there is a Spanish group called Cintra who does a lot of business stateside. See these articles for more information. [1] [2]
If I am not mistaken, Apple has been awarded patents in the area of localized haptics using tiny actuators. It may be that no rival solution has emerged. I was also quite upset when the announcement dissolved into a UI metaphor.
Imagine trying to teach philology, while also teaching them their first language! This is exactly the problem that CS program directors face.
I work as a researcher in the computer science department at the University of Alabama, and I can tell you this is an ongoing conversation/debate not only here, but at many schools across the southeast. Unlike the valley, we have a tremendous shortage of developers, and that pressure ends up being felt at the university level.
To combat this, classes have been opened that expose the students to software engineering principles while not losing the theory that differentiates computer science from programming. This is largely helping, but is still, in many respects, an experiment.
Also at play is the notion that there are people in computer science that fall more into the design disciplines (i.e. HCI, UI, UX people). Right now, we have nothing for these people except double majoring with art/phycology and the occasional HCI class, but this may change soon. There are certainly frontiers in this area yet to be explored!
Either way, it's a big problem worth discussing, so I am happy I see it here.
I work as a research engineer (MS EE) at the University of Alabama, and we have experienced a similar problem for our faculty members. The problem has been mitigated to a degree by help from professional staff (like myself) at various "centers" on campus that explore more practical applications of the research being conducted.
We do not receive a stipend for any extra work we do for a professor, but in just a few short years, our input has done wonders for building more complete students.
As for the rise in PhDs, I can confirm the our engineering college is pressuring faculty to graduate more PhDs. Our dean just had a meeting saying we need to "double our PhD output" just to stay competitive. As with most things, he admitted that it all boils down to money.
More PhD students means more potential funding. More funding means better facilities. Better facilities means better quality students, which means a better reputation. Better reputation leads to more/better grants coming your way and the wheel goes round and round...
I develop apps for both major mobile platforms, and when I speak with designers and artists about Android and iOS, they overwhelmingly prefer iOS. Since they use iOS devices themselves, it is their go to platform. It is almost always the one they want to work with.
Oddly, when I ask them why, the answers are mostly qualitative. It has nothing to do with "reaching the most people" or "getting exposure". It's a simple matter of taste. Designers tend to choose iOS products because they identify with them. They see Apple as an institution that they would enjoy being a part of in some way. Almost all the designers I know that are worth their salt use and love their macs for working in Photoshop and Illustrator, so it naturally follows that they prefer the iOS platform, regardless of numbers and market share.
Admittedly, my sample size is only around 50 or so, but this has been my experience.
I'm not knocking this or any particular xxxx-to-mobile platform, but as a native iOS and android developer, I would highly recommend just learning the native languages and frameworks.
First, you have the absolute most control you will ever have over your application. This may not be true when a particular tool becomes popular, say at the release of a new tool, but this definitely shows up as time progresses. Who knows what tools will keep up with the native frameworks terms of functionality?
Another reason that is more qualitative, is that you come into contact different design styles, code styles and paradigms. Objective-C, for instance, is a tricky beast sometimes, but it is an interesting language with a lot to learn both good and bad. The new things you learn will most definitely carry over into your web programming!
The third reason to code natively, and I cannot stress this enough, is third-party library support. Maven and cocoa pods may dependency management much better on the mobile platforms, and using a third-party tool will most likely render all those advancements useless. There are some amazing libraries for both platforms that you definitely don't want to miss. They were reduce the amount of time you spend coding and improve your baseline quality.
This year my dad, a football coach, lugged an overhead projector with a bucket full of transparencies and visa-vis markers to a football clinic he was asked to speak at. When the younger coaches saw the ancient contraption, word got out on twitter, and my dad was past capacity for his talk. Many of the youngest coaches had never even seen an overhead projector!
By the time his talk was over, he had drawn (we might say derived) his ideas right in front of them, adapting to the questions that came his way. Most people said they really enjoyed the more interactive style my father taught in contrast to the stale power points of some other presenters. A great reminder that some people (including me!) learn best when things are derived in front of them with a dynamic teacher.
I think a lot could be said here for maintainability. As others have mentioned, it really goes a long way to take the time and refactor the class to inherit the extra/common functionality if you are working on a team or working on a project that you know will live a very long time. Swizzling will certainly work, but at what cost to readability, debugging and reuse? That's normally the question I ask before swizzling or doing fancy, dynamic things.
Sometimes the quickest or even the most elegant solution isn't necessarily the "best" one. Best being a subjective term, I would say it depends on what you need from your code over time and with whom.
I work at a development house at the University of Alabama, and we have found that our free GitHub micro account has been a wonderful gateway drug of sorts for learning git. But, having just moved over from an SVN set up to an in-house git system (RhodeCode), I would echo the others who have said that other git tools are better for us than GitHub for teaching git.
Without a doubt, GitHub's educational accounts have been great for our undergraduate students because they have exposed them to great open source code and a community that is excited about development. In short, we have found that the intangible gains have far outweighed the tangible gains of a few private repos. Kudos to the GitHub staff for continuing I make development and collaboration fun and easy.
One of the reasons for the very high amount of single parents in the South is the VERY harsh sentences for non-violent drug crime, especially among African Americans. Sometimes 10 years for first offenses [1]. Yikes.
Even worse, many in the past ten years are being denied parole [2].
Why the high recidivism? I'm glad you asked. The culprit is For-Profit Prisons [3]. They come in to an area, pay off local judges and congresspeople, and watch the money roll in. Absolutely despicable, and something I am working to end. If you only read one link, read number 3.
I remember as a child the first time understanding the gravitas of significant amounts of money. My parents had helped me save up with chores, birthday money, etc. to the point where I could now afford the thing I always wanted: a Nintendo 64.
I remember going to Toys R Us to buy it and when I got there, for the first time in my life, I wasn't so sure about spending the money. There was so much effort tied to it that, even as a child, it struck me that I was trading all of this time and effort for this one product. My mom made me count out each $20 bill, teaching me that money was not some nebulous idea (looking at you credit cards). Every $20 bill I counted made me think more about what I was doing.
I eventually bought it, but because all of the time spent saving up for it, I took good care of it and found it to be the most beloved console I ever owned. I feel that this experience definitely helped me understand the value of money relative to my efforts.
Oh, and my mother bought me Starfox 64 specifically to nail the point home. If you are reading this, mom, I love you.
This is, in my opinion, the best answer. The dynamic nature of the language is something that allows for great flexibility, especially in passing objects of varying types down the road until it is time for them to be displayed.
For example, if I have a news aggregator that keeps an array of 4-5 types of article objects, I may want to process them differently in a UITableView. I could store them all in the array and then do type checking at the time they should be rendered to determine how each are displayed. Of course, this can be achieved in statically typed languages as well if, say, each article class inherited from a common class, but what if they don't? On that note, does anyone know how this library handles inheritance?
This library would definitely help if you prefer the statically typed languages, but I would be wary of losing the freedom of Objective-C. Instead of binding data containers to types, perhaps good documentation and clearly written code is more the answer.
We can say what we will about TED Talks, but it is a hell of a lot better for humanity than Jersey Shore or much of the useless crap on television. Like anything, given enough time, TED will have to fight off self promotion and the recycling of ideas to remain pure and relevant, but I am confident that the fight is worth fighting.
I have a friend who teaches middle school Biology, and his students (in his words) "light up" whenever they watch a great TED talk about the similarities between chickens and dinosaurs or the way a gecko can swim through the air while falling based on something way up it's evolutionary tree. I think science-driven TED talks fill a great purpose in inspiring people that may not (yet) be scientifically minded.
Perhaps it isn't as bad as Bratton believes it is, because I can still show a good TED talk to my non-techy mother or father and blow their minds. My father is a deep thinker, but just doesn't come across deep or novel ideas very often in daily life. He is a football coach, so he just doesn't get a lot of that between dealing with kid problems and trying to win. TED has been wonderful for delivering him a nice, distilled idea to think about.
If nothing else, TED gives the general populace a starting point for the state of high-level research and a chance to think about something other than their mortgage or drama on twitter. And it does so in a manner that can be highly entertaining. It is sadly surprising how many people live a whole day, a whole month or a whole year without being inspired by anything at all. Anything that can inspire the public positively should be protected, refined and celebrated.
If anyone has used both, please let me know some overall impressions. I am considering building a game soon and am curious about the best platform moving forward.
What concern is there about Jolla custom applications being written in C++? I'm not exactly knocking the language as I have never used it to build a app, but generally speaking the language is a bit lower-level than Java and Objective-C (w/ ARC).
Just wondering if anyone has developed anything on this platform and what there experiences have been.
Much like net neutrality is the topic of the FCC, cargo neutrality on rail lines was the topic of the ICC [1] in their day. The problem of the early 1900s began with a bounty of riches in the highly competitive American Railway sector. Merchants using the railways were demanding "rebates" from railway companies for large shipments threatening to take business elsewhere and driving their shipping costs down. Of course, the same leverage was not available to smaller shippers, making their rates much higher and forcing them to raise the prices of their goods. The system was out of balance.
In 1903, congress and President Theodore Roosevelt, passed the Elkins Act [2], which eliminated rebates, but had the unfortunate side-effect of increasing price collusion between shippers and the railroads. The Elkins act did not establish a fixed rate, leaving interests to make deals that, again, were disadvantageous for smaller businesses. The only metric of discrimination was the diverting from a fixed railway schedule [3].
To correct the problems of the Elkins Act, the Hepburn Act was passed in 1906 greatly expanding the power of the ICC to regulate the Railroad Industry. The result was fixed prices on shipping deemed "just and reasonable" by the ICC, increased penalties for non-compliance, and an open and standard accounting system for the railroad companies. (As an aside, the depreciation of railway companies contributed to the Panic of 1907. A good word on that here: [4])
If all this back and forth sounds familiar, it is because we are facing the same problem today shipping bits that we were shipping coal and shirts all those years ago. The idea of prioritized delivery is not new or novel, but was dealt with before Netflix and Verizon began suing one another. What interests me is whether we will see legislation similar to the Elkins and Hepburn act for digital goods and services. I doubt very seriously that we will get fixed $/(Mbps) or $/GB mandates from the FCC, but already we are seeing definitions being made and lines being drawn [5]. There is already language from Wheeler about "responsibility to the 20 percent [without 25down/3up]", just as there was strong language from Roosevelt about the railway industries.
2015 will be an interesting year indeed.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission [2] http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-TR/TR-Enc... [3] http://books.google.com/books?id=g-pCAAAAIAAJ&dq=elkins%20ac... [4] http://books.google.com/books?id=R3koAAAAYAAJ&hl=en [5] http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/broadband-now-defined-25-...