Tamerlin

16 ms·

31.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
" sales to Apple went a long way towards funding the fabs that enable Samsung to now sell flash to so many other companies, too." Of that I'm a bit skeptical. For one thing, this sort of idea was fairly common about the G4 processors, even
32.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
Only OpenJDK is open source. Other than that, Java is closed -- and to certify a Java implementation, you have to pay a license fee, which not the case for .NET. IMO were it not for the Oracle acquisition, it would be a matter of time until
33.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
AFAIK Microsoft has even contributed code to the Mono project.
34.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
It was never high-level enterprise offering. The part that Apple never figured out was the support side of things. They priced their hardware competitively, and it was good hardware, but in all of their price comparisons they ignored the re
35.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
This is government work. The US government continues to award contracts to companies that consistently fail -- either massively over budget, extremely late, incomplete, non-functional, or (most often) some combination of all four.
36.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
I've witnessed that a number of times -- at one company I worked with, we had a team of 30 people disabled even though all of the unit tests worked fine. Someone had inserted something into some shared code (that with even marginally compet
37.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
So far in my experience, good design does far more to help maintain velocity than tests. In most applications I've been stuck on, the tests ended up being an impediment to development -- because the design was poor. The tests helped to reve
38.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
That was why my phone interview with Google turned me off to it... the interviewer and the recruiter had different DAYS on their schedules to talk to me, and the interviewer proved to be... well, not exactly the sharpest tack in the box. Or
39.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
"For instance, IBM now has about a 90% share of the mainframe market, but mainframe sales account for just a fraction of IBM's total revenues and profits." Look at how much of the rest of IBM's revenues come from services related to mainfra
40.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
"For cinematic CG the models, textures and other assets are absolutely huge - it's not unusual for a single shot to come to hundreds of gigabytes." I recall reading an article, IIRC in CineFX, about the Godzilla model in Gozilla 2000 (the D
41.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
There's no way that would be at all productive. It's not like the only thing that the artist is doing is typing characters on a screen. There's also a lot more going on than just echoing pixels like in an IDE. For a character animator, ther
42.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
At amazon, I got stuck adding features to software that had already been deprecated... three years before I joined. Not only was I not passionate about that, but since it was the first time I'd encountered code with lower quality and even m
43.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
I agree with you. I almost stopped reading the article at that point, because it will tend to get you clueless zealots rather than competent engineers.
44.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
Though some of Apple's acquisitions fit that description (Nothing Real and eMagic -- though it seems like they managed to kill off Nothing Real, which is sad), they've also bought a few companies that didn't have any products at all, like R
45.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
"What for???" Not to imply that I think it's likely, but Sony DOES have something that Apple might benefit from: manufacturing. Don't forget, Sony makes quite a few semiconductor products -- including, for example, the sensors in Nikon's di
46.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
If it was as simple as working hard at it or being determined then everyone would be doing it. No, this is precisely why almost most people are not doing it: they don't want to work hard and keep at something that isn't easy for them.
47.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
"It's also a good way to lead people on to guaranteed failure, deluding them into thinking if they work hard enough or try hard enough they can accomplish something." There is only one route to guaranteed failure: don't try. "Most of us are
48.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
Talent is a myth. It's also a cop-out for those who think that they don't have it.
49.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
Indeed -- it's surprisingly hard to read as a result.
50.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
The shady stuff they did with IE6 mattered because MS was already so big when they did it.
51.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
Unless you're designing and manufacturing the CPU's yourself, a custom Cortex implementation would probably cost you quite a bit more than just buying Atom or someone else's Cortex implementation would. You'd have to pay for the custom desi
52.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
"Probably of all tech companies, Intel is the one I'd be most hardpressed to bet against in their core market." True, in Intel's core market (high-end server, desktop and laptop CPUs), Intel is nigh unassailable. No other semiconductor manu
53.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
"Hence a prediction: within less than 5 years a Mac will be running on an Apple designed ARM processor." That assertion presupposes that Apple will give up the professional content creation market entirely. If they've killed off Shake and c
54.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
Got it in one...
55.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
I think Microsoft's situation is even more sad than that. How much cool new stuff as Microsoft Research dreamed up that got snuffed out when the management got wind of it but didn't think that it was worth productizing? IBM had the same pro
56.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
I suspect that it's related to history, because there is a reason that the term "Microserf" exists. Microsoft used to operate like amazon does today -- burn the developers out and who gives a $# about turnout, because EVERYONE wants to wo
57.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
"I think a big reason why people don't like Microsoft, is the anti-competitive behavior they used to get to the size they are today." That's completely nonsensical. Microsoft didn't act anti-competitively to become big, they did it AFTER be
58.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
Oracle's friends are Fortune 500 executives with small minds and deep pockets. That is to say, people who are willing to shell out for Oracle products and services when there are considerably better and less expensive alternatives available
59.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
How about C# in the form of Mono?
60.
by Tamerlin 16y ago
"A compiler is not exactly a competitive advantage for a company as big as Apple." Apple might not make money directly with its compiler, but for its 3rd party developers to be stuck with a mediocre compiler is definitely a disadvantage for

More ›