Hey! My first introduction to software engineering was via HyperCard in an advanced elementary school math class in the Texas public school system in the early 90s. I have made a nearly 30 year career out of the passion my teacher and a volunteer parent sparked in that class.
Mine as well (well, not in Texas). I have fond memories of building a bunch of simple adventure games with my classmates - it was incredibly easy to learn how to use the authoring tools.
What's weak about the grandmother effect? Selective pressure absolutely applies outside of reproductive phases of the individual. Evolution happens at the genetic level, not only at the level of the individual organism. If a related organism is able to increase the reproductive chances of another organism with shared DNA (i.e. a child, grandchild, sibling, etc.), the related organism won't be directly reproducing, but it will absolutely be affecting the genetic material being passed down.
WSJ does not claim google is guilty in this article. The title is factual. What would you suggest they title the article? "anything else they publish about google" is pretty wildly hyperbolic, and obviously false.
I don’t begrudge them their money. But I feel a lot more at ease depending on a company whose business model is I give them money and they give me stuff and that they are doing so profitably. That’s part of the reason that I’m a big fan of companies like Backblaze and JetBrains.
I worked as a dev lead for one company where we were our vendors largest customer (over 60% of their revenue). I recommended that we either don’t depend on that vendor for our new implementation when contract renewals came or that we insisted on them putting their code in escrow in case they were sold and they abandoned the software.
Yes it did. But the stated hopes of most of the posters on this submission seem to be that they will be a viable competitor to the big server chip manufacturers.
Regular expressions (regexp) can be understood at a pretty impactful level within a solid hour of focus. For all the developers or even just heavy computer users, the ability to find and replace exactly what you're looking for is a game-changer.
True. I have a Chevy volt, which I love. The check engine light came on while under powertrain warranty. It took them 5 days to upgrade the software to fix the problem, and they charged me for it since "software isn't part of the drivetrain."
GM is a very early adopter of the connect car, with their On Stsr technology. Your Chevy Volt should have it and if it's a newer model probably LTE. I would guess that there's some contractual or legal obligation that says GM cannot do work on your car. The dealers must do the work, and then get reimbursed by GM.
There's antiquated laws hat dictate manufacturer and dealer relationship, the most famous one being a manufacturer must sell cars through a dealer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the original rationale behind requiring cars to be sold through dealers was to regulate the market and create competition among different dealers. Without that requirement, manufacturers could easily undercut dealers due to lower overhead. I'm not really sure what the point of car dealers is, but they have somehow found a way to prove themselves "necessary" to some lawmakers in some states.
> I'm not really sure what the point of car dealers is
From a DOJ analysis:
> Auto production is a capital-intensive business and a franchise system allowed manufacturers to concentrate their resources upstream while accessing capital through franchise fees from independent entrepreneurs at the retail level.
Given capital availability and resources at the time, it made sense for the auto makers to franchise.
Not sure why you're downvoted. This is the first rational explanation for this I've ever seen - thanks. Doesn't really justify it still existing today, but makes me hate the system a little less.
Musk is pretty divisive here to be honest. I see tons of anti Musk comments. I assume from your tone you aren't a fan of his, so I think what we're both seeing is confirmation bias that everyone is against our opinions.
It's a rationale explanation and I see a part of it. It's not like McDonalds, where they have a corporate owned store and a franchisee store. Any price difference would be measured in nickels and no one is going to drive to the other side of the city to buy a burger. But if a corporate dealer can knock off $1,000 on a car just because there is no middle man, I can see why no one would want to franchise a dealership.
Thank you for responding to my confusion with this excellent article. It is intriguing to me that increased information on pricing and availability through the Internet has already eroded some of the benefits of dealership regulation. Perhaps they are a dying breed even with protective regulation that at least in the past proved mutually beneficial for automakers and dealerships.
If that were true, then they wouldn't need laws forbidding manufacturers from selling directly.
Dealers love to tell us how useful they are, but then they turn around and lobby for their privileged position to be enshrined in law and enforced by the government. Does not compute.
Dealers must provide value. Using laws to "create" competition is foolish and wrong.
If there's no value in me buying a screwdriver set from Home Depot I should be able to buy it from anyone else, including the manufacturer.
In other words, there's no fundamental reason or "right" that says a dealer must exist between a manufacturer of a good and the consumers of that good. Forcing such a structure is artificial and causes problems.
For example, lots of people hate the car buying experience and dealing with a "mafia-like" (as a friend put it) dynamic between hungry commission-based sales people and the manager in the back. The whole process is disgusting. It took three hours to get out of the dealer last time I bought a car and it was a brawl to not get screwed.
I hate dealers too and hate this law, but read this[1] comment that is a sibling to yours. It explains why this law exists. It's a shame it hasn't been removed yet because it is quite dated at this point.
As a manufacturer I am very familiar with the distribution model. Dealers do create an opportunity to have a smooth flowing supply pipeline as well as inventory distributed near consumers. They make money, you make money. The difference is that in my business I have very tight controls over what my resellers can do and how they do it. The government doesn't get involved.
In the auto business dealers can be horrible places to walk into. The other day one of my friends at the gym bought a used car. She got royally screwed. I didn't tell her because it'd break her heart. They did the old "let's talk about the monthly payment" trick. She is mathematically challenged and couldn't have managed the stream of information during the negotiations. She will be paying $24K for a $10K purchase.
Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh
The proof of Fermat's last theorem has a long and intriguing history, and Singh's writing is accessible and entertaining for anyone with an interest in math and science, regardless of education level.
I thought the point of watermarking is to prevent people from using your images without your branding, but if it's done on the client side, it's easy to circumvent:
I guess it depends on the person. For example, I release all my photography as CC-BY-SA. So I'm okay with anyone either
(a) using my watermarked images as-is, without needing to write a credit separately, since the watermark is effectively an attribution
OR
(b) using my unwatermarked images for whatever CC-BY-SA compliant derivative works, and display attribution in some other appropriate fashion.
So I display watermarked images in the browser by default, primarily for convenient sharing without worrying about attribution, but make the unwatermarked images available for download if someone needs it for (b).
You are correct. This would serve the purpose for many users who don't know how to go digging around for urls in JS, but more importantly its a tool for generating them on the client so a server doesn't have to - say for a CMS?
That's all fine until Googlebot-Image comes along, collects up all your unwatermarked images, and displays them in search results for the world to use.
I can see this being useful for running as a batch process in Node/IO.js and uploading to, say, S3.
Well what if you batch it in the browser? It is quite possible to use file inputs to generate watermarked images without ever storing the image you are watermarking, and then upload the result.
As someone who is considering using a JavaScript framework for client-side rendering on a new application, this strikes me as an anecdotal over-simplification. We can find terrible uses of any technology. I'm not sure that is a reason not to use that technology.
I believe the theory is that your application may take a little longer to load initially, but subsequent interactions should be much faster, since all rendering is happening on the client, and the server is only delivering API interaction. There is also the potential for even the initial render to be faster depending on what server-side rendering logic is being transferred to the client.
> subsequent interactions should be much faster, since all rendering is happening on the client, and the server is only delivering API interaction
It depends on what you are actually doing and how much you cache client side, but for most cases that isn't going to make things faster for the end user.
Take the example of a theoretical blog post that takes 10ms to get from the database and 50ms to render on the server. You could potentially save server capacity by shifting that 50ms of rendering* from the server to client, but in actual fact the client (a low powered mobile device) probably renders it slower than the server.
The main thing though is this doesn't take into account the 2500ms round trip time it takes the mobile device to make a HTTP request. This is going to be the same whether you render on the client or server.
Now I agree it makes sense in some cases, if you cache the data on the client (ie an email client could cache the 100 most recent emails) then it will be faster, but the most services that use client side rendering aren't doing this, so there is no real benefit to the end user.
(Apologies if I'm just repeating the article, but it's down for me)
*Serialising into whatever format you API uses is still rendering, so you aren't actually saving 50ms.
