6 ms·

Public opinion changes when mainstream entities (people/organizations) validate something new. Microsoft has been coming out with good stuff for several years n

Public opinion changes when mainstream entities (people/organizations) validate something new. Microsoft has been coming out with good stuff for several years now, but that opinion has been restricted to a subset of technophiles. If in 2014 you told someone about tablets and styluses, you'd either get a dumb look or the standard Jobs like ("you're doing in wrong") So what happened in 2015? Well, Apple validated (copied) Microsoft's work. Today you can tell someone about a tablet stylus or keyboard cover and they'll enthusiastically agree it's good, because did you hear? The iPad has it.

berntb 11y ago
There has been lots of pencils for iPads for years -- and keyboards in the cover (3rd party). And then we have Newton. The thing is -- when Apple adds a feature, you know it will work well. If Apple can't make it work well, it won't be added. So by now everyone knows that if Apple do something, it is good. The copies might be good -- but mostly a few years later, when they had time to do a carbon copy... (That said, I'll probably go Android for my next phone/pad, so I can get music on them without iTunes. I only have Linux at home these days. But I'm still hoping for Jolla/Ubuntu.)
petke 11y ago
For me it was about 2012. Herb Sutter (at MS) wrote his famous "Welcome to the jungle" article (http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle). It seemed if anyone was adapting, their platform, development tools, and languages to match the revolution in hardware, it was MS. (Given this revolution, on the language side MS changed focus from managed languages to the previously neglected native C++)
- _pmf_ 11y ago
  > It seemed if anyone was adapting, their platform, development tools, and languages to match the revolution in hardware, it was MS. C#'s async/await certainly the most accessible way of doing asynchronous operations in any mainstream language. The same for PLINQ and (simple) parallelism. Clojure, a language that supposedly has concurrency as a main focus, is awkward and arcane in comparison.
  - petke 11y ago
    As I understand it some things managed languages have against them; The garbage collector. Even lock free garbage collectors require some synchronization. That doesn't scale well to many cores. Another things is that low level memory layout and alignment matters for users, to avoid false sharing etc. In managed languages you end up fighting a system that tries to hide low level things like this from you. Finally managed languages have ref semantic and therefore use a lot of pointers under the hood. However the data layout that is the cache friendliest is contiguous memory, so the core can predict and pre fetch the next values into cache. A core that has to chase down pointers all over the memory address get a lot of cache misses.
alttab 11y ago
We all remember this, right? http://www.cultofmac.com/388350/ipad-pro-comic/ http://www.cultofmac.com/388350/ipad-pro-comic/ Sums it up fairly well.
clessg 11y ago
Related: http://i.imgur.com/YBBa3dW.jpg http://i.imgur.com/YBBa3dW.jpg Edit: Ninja'd.
gotchange 11y ago
What you're basically describing in your comment is the concept of "cultural hegemony" [0] popularized by Gramsci in Marxist philosophy but superimposed on tech context. Apple clearly acting as the bourgeoisie of the today's tech world where Microsoft is relegated to the proletarian rank and file and because of that Apple somewhat gets to dictate what are the accepted social and cultural norms in the tech world and we the proletariat have to just comply with their edicts or face some form of "tech ostracism". [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
- martythemaniak 11y ago
  It makes sense that this was noticed long ago, although personally I cribbed it from Krugman's "VSPs". It's easy to noticed in everyday life though. Most people don't have the time/energy/incentive/desire/background knowledge/etc to form independent opinions, so they pick up the opinions of people who speak to their identity. If you see yourself (and want to be seen as) a "creative type with good taste", you'll just read DaringFireball and repeat whatever Gruber says. If you want to be "principled, anti-establishment", you'll crib Stallman, etc, etc.

berntb 11y ago

There has been lots of pencils for iPads for years -- and keyboards in the cover (3rd party). And then we have Newton. The thing is -- when Apple adds a feature, you know it will work well. If Apple can't make it work well, it won't be added. So by now everyone knows that if Apple do something, it is good. The copies might be good -- but mostly a few years later, when they had time to do a carbon copy... (That said, I'll probably go Android for my next phone/pad, so I can get music on them without iTunes. I only have Linux at home these days. But I'm still hoping for Jolla/Ubuntu.)

petke 11y ago

For me it was about 2012. Herb Sutter (at MS) wrote his famous "Welcome to the jungle" article (http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle). It seemed if anyone was adapting, their platform, development tools, and languages to match the revolution in hardware, it was MS. (Given this revolution, on the language side MS changed focus from managed languages to the previously neglected native C++)

_pmf_ 11y ago
> It seemed if anyone was adapting, their platform, development tools, and languages to match the revolution in hardware, it was MS. C#'s async/await certainly the most accessible way of doing asynchronous operations in any mainstream language. The same for PLINQ and (simple) parallelism. Clojure, a language that supposedly has concurrency as a main focus, is awkward and arcane in comparison.
- petke 11y ago
  As I understand it some things managed languages have against them; The garbage collector. Even lock free garbage collectors require some synchronization. That doesn't scale well to many cores. Another things is that low level memory layout and alignment matters for users, to avoid false sharing etc. In managed languages you end up fighting a system that tries to hide low level things like this from you. Finally managed languages have ref semantic and therefore use a lot of pointers under the hood. However the data layout that is the cache friendliest is contiguous memory, so the core can predict and pre fetch the next values into cache. A core that has to chase down pointers all over the memory address get a lot of cache misses.

alttab 11y ago

We all remember this, right? http://www.cultofmac.com/388350/ipad-pro-comic/ http://www.cultofmac.com/388350/ipad-pro-comic/ Sums it up fairly well.

clessg 11y ago

Related: http://i.imgur.com/YBBa3dW.jpg http://i.imgur.com/YBBa3dW.jpg Edit: Ninja'd.

gotchange 11y ago

What you're basically describing in your comment is the concept of "cultural hegemony" [0] popularized by Gramsci in Marxist philosophy but superimposed on tech context. Apple clearly acting as the bourgeoisie of the today's tech world where Microsoft is relegated to the proletarian rank and file and because of that Apple somewhat gets to dictate what are the accepted social and cultural norms in the tech world and we the proletariat have to just comply with their edicts or face some form of "tech ostracism". [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

martythemaniak 11y ago
It makes sense that this was noticed long ago, although personally I cribbed it from Krugman's "VSPs". It's easy to noticed in everyday life though. Most people don't have the time/energy/incentive/desire/background knowledge/etc to form independent opinions, so they pick up the opinions of people who speak to their identity. If you see yourself (and want to be seen as) a "creative type with good taste", you'll just read DaringFireball and repeat whatever Gruber says. If you want to be "principled, anti-establishment", you'll crib Stallman, etc, etc.