People at the University of Washington don’t refer to soda pop the same way as people at Berkley, or at MIT, or at Oxford. Why would they all have had the exact same term for writing software?
Edit: I’m being argumentative, I honestly have no idea what term was common then. At that point most people I knew referred to it as “computer stuff”
It’s probably predominantly because of the switch to mobile computing / smartphones / web being dominant, and everyone referring to programs there as “apps” / applications.
i.e. If you write a mobile app with a function-as-a-service backend, you will never compile what someone would refer to as a “program”, so calling yourself a “programmer” (as-in, someone who makes programs) feels inaccurate and a not helpful description for people. “Coder” (as-in, someone who writes code) is a vaguer in terms of the type of code you write and more accurate in terms of what you spend your time producing.
Also anyone writing scripts, or even just using stuff like AWS Lambda / functions as a service, etc. etc.
In your specific circles.
And what hardware do they run Linux on? And what phone do they use? And what TV device?
And if they’re not a mac fan boy, then they’re insistence of looking at Apple as the only possible sign of industry trends is mind boggingly narrow.
Do I really miss it? It never once came up in any practical situation.
You would buy a mobo and a CPU and put them together and not think about the specific buses or controllers you have available, unless you had a very specific reason to.
Unless we’re talking about a mobile power constrained device, I certainly would rather have expandable RAM and graphics cards then everything slammed in a single unchanging chip.
And again, the fact that the author states that Nvidia can’t release an integrated SoC because they didn’t buy ARM, when they actively sell an integrated SoC licensed from ARM, makes the entire rest of their “opinion”, untrustworthy.
This is a bad article. It’s just an Apple fanboy watching their company continue its trend of shitting on customers and assuming that everyone inevitably will, apparently never once reflecting on whether their insistence of sticking with Apple is the real problem.
Their argument boils down to CPUs increasingly integrating basic versions of other components over time meaning that desktops will disappear… Ignoring that the desktop market has stayed surprisingly flat that entire time and has certainly not disappeared.
If your argument is that integrated CPUs will outclass discrete components connected with high speed buses then you need to make it from an engineering standpoint, not a headline one.
I also don’t understand his reasoning that because NVidia don’t buy ARM they don’t get to make an integrated CPU… Nvidia made and sold an integrated ARM CPU before ever being rumoured to buy them, and they still make and sell it to this day … because ARM’s entire business model is based on companies like Nvidia licensing their designs.
If you’re talking the US government, then no, they don’t need political capital from the people, they just need capital capital and they can use that to swing elections and bribe politicians.
Regardless, some AI companies will inevitably survive. It is legitimately useful in solving a ton of problems that were near impossible before. Literally this xkcd. Now it’s not “I’ll need a research team and five years”, it’s “sure, easy API hit, we’ll just have to manage cost / use”, in the future, it will be “sure, we’ll just add a background task client side”.
First of all, the author states part of the issue, then bets against it at the end:
Maybe the technology is still in its primitive stage, some breakthrough will come, and tricked-out houses will soon work seamlessly, removing friction and frustration from everyday tasks. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
The technology is literally in its primitive infancy. Matter is the open smart home standard, and the first version only just launched a couple years ago. They’ve been continuously working on it and adding to it, but we are literally still in the 1.X era of the first smart home standard of any kind.
And that’s just the backbone. That’s like the Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse era, where North America just established that we’re all going to use 120V, 60Hz AC electricity. It took a genuinely long time (decades) for light switches and receptacles to get as good and standardized and seamless as they are now.
The forces of corporate walled gardens do tend towards a fragmented experience, but interoperable standards have prevailed before, and Home Assistant is the single most actively developed open source project and is a driving force for true consumer focused home automation.
Secondly, a bunch of the author’s complaints are nonsense / just badly designed versions of smart home products:
Honestly, my takeaway from this piece is:
I mean, when you could convert Xbox Live Gold credits to Gamepass and get it for like $60 a year, it was genuinely a great deal. And that lasted for like 4+ years.
Damn, that sucks.
The studio head of Modern Warfare (all ghillied up), Titanfall / Titanfall 2, and Apex Legends. The guy clearly had an eye for talent and knew how to make a memorable game. RIP.
Code signing should be done though.
You can disagree with Apple’s approach that maintains them as the only signing authority, but, at a fundamental level, code signing is the only way to distribute an executable and have the user be able to trust who authored it (and thus what’s in it).
Again, no, because that’s not a resolution, that’s a pixel density at a set distance.
While I get your point, this is an article, not a whitepaper.
If someone says something that is obviously not a thing, like ‘the perfect resolution of an analog painting’, then it means the author probably didn’t actually understand what they read and so you shouldn’t trust their interpretation of the underlying news.
That’s not a resolution, that’s a pixel density at a set distance. It’s also arbitrary on Apple’s end, not actually a meaningful universal measurement.
To demonstrate the efficacy of the tiny screen, the researchers reproduced The Kiss, a famous artwork painted by Gustav Klimt. The image was shown in perfect resolution on the screen, which at approximately 1.4 x 1.9 mm was 1/4000th that of a standard smartphone.
This makes me doubt the author of the article’s credibility. What exactly is the “perfect resolution” of a hand painted piece of art?
The underlying paper is published in Nature which adds more credibility to its significance but an article that presents none of the limitations, drawbacks, or broader industry context that might hold something like this back isn’t adding much. What was the colour depth? Refresh rate? Is it thrown if the external light shifts and changes? How many children have to be sacrificed to the machine gods to produce it? Etc. etc.
Why?
Lack of Feature Parity
Stickiness of library transfer
Stickiness of social network effects
It’s still better ethically than Apple Music or YouTube Music, which behave anti-competitively
1: I’ve tried out Quobuz, it’s pretty good, but it does not have the Jam / Group Session feature which me and my friends use constantly while gaming remotely. It also does not have an Xbox app which I use while playing games. I find Spotify’s recommendations somewhat underwhelming, but Quobuz has a noticeably worse recommendation engine, at least for my genres and tastes. Those are the features that lack parity that matter to me, but for some others, it’s things like amplifiers having built-in Spotify, or there being a Roku or Playstation app or something.
2: Quobuz uses a third party service to automatically transfer your library, which worked pretty well, but did require jumping through a bunch of hoops and subscribing to a trial subscription that I then had to cancel. It also did not find matches for some songs. Could I make it work if I had enough reason to switch? Yeah, probably, but the lack of feature parity (/roadmap that includes them) is enough to dissuade me from really trying.
3: In addition to friends on Spotify all using Jams, there’s also an inherent niceness to just being able to text people Spotify links, especially since there’s no cross platform linking service that would otherwise make sharing music easy.
4: Supporting Spotify may not be great, but its still better than supporting trillion dollar anti-competitive corporations like Apple and Google.
I misread the comment hierarchy, I thought this was a part of a different chain.
No one should be able to do it is the right reaction, but ‘Nintendo deserves no blame or shame for choosing to do it’ is the wrong reaction. Nintendo could have used all the money it spends on IP lawyers to instead lobby the government to change the patent system, but they chose not to.
If you’re a user who grows up using one, and then starts following instructions on how to build one, when are you going to come across the word program?
It will be app, maybe application, saas software, functions a service, compute as a service etc etc. Hell what most people think of as an “app” is really a collection of applications all working together.