P.S.: Oh, and don't dare to taint towel day with the lamest drawn character of all time. You know who I mean. That one of South Park infame.
Amazing how some of y'all just don't get the homage of the towelie character to HGTTG.
What's the answer? 42.
And Don't Forget Your Towel.
As far as I can tell, this idea that somehow this could become a supervolcano and an extinction event seems completely unsupported by the AC's post...
So please, could I have one cite from a scientist even possibly suggesting that? What was said by the software engineer in the examiner blog isn't supported by anything other than his assertion... and only really by his metaphor of calling it a volcano of oil.
I call this talking out of his ass unless more can be presented.
But fp is, by nature, slightly imprecise. Really, Really Small numbers would get lost in the noise.
No, they don't. Read the article posted earlier today for more information.
Now wait, you should know full well that "really, really" small numbers in single precision that are smaller than 0.00000x10^-126 are going to get lost.
Good thing that its posted AC. It's not an original work. But it has also been passed around a lot, minor refinements made, and without attribution since it was authored. The short essay is apparently originally titled I AM AN AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE SHITHEEL
It's at least as old as September 09, 2009.
Found an older reference at reddit around August 08, 2009.
And somebody attributed that likely the original author posted to the Laissez Faire subforum on Something Awful (Jul 24, 2009) as randomnoise. Some attribution also to a 4chan post (but nothing older than SA post was found)
But seems to be more less plagiarized or inspired (depending on your P.O.V.) by a short rant in July 2004. Also found at michaelmoore.com August 2004, by John Gray, Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican. But, I think the original author is generally unknown.
And then there's the Libertarian response in October 2004 to THAT titled Statist Joe by Gil Gullory, a Halliburton employee.
The poor pay proportionally 12 times as much of their income on compliance, making this a very regressive system.
And yet we continue to allow Jackson Hewitt, H&R Block, Liberty Tax, et. al. to dupe them with prep fees, Refund Anticipation Loans (RAL), Refund Anticipation Check (RAC) and other stupid products.
Paying somebody to prepare a 1040EZ is extremely ignorant. I'd like to see George Soros or somebody with some cash fund a media campaign telling people to save their money and do the EZ themselves with direct deposit.
From what I could tell, the prep fee alone is $39 for a 1040EZ at H&R Block and $29 for a state income tax return, before being upsold a RAC or RAL. Got a mortgage? The price goes up. The IRS could probably garner less hate if we regulated the retail Tax Prep industry more closely, and educated people with a media campaign. Ridiculous.
For that matter, there should probably be another level of simplified 1040EE to catch the next most common group of complications that are beyond an EZ.
Fine, I'll lobby for it.
It will take years to optimize HTML5 to something comparable to Flash.
Why? The Flash Player has over a decade of poor design decisions in SWF, bug-for-bug reproduction, etc, that it has to keep backward compatibility with. HTML5 canvas gets a nice fresh start having (hopefully) learned those lessons. IMHO, you'll see a lot of work with phenomenal improvements optimizing the runtimes, just like we saw with Javascript, in a quick surge. A lot of the same engineers who did did the magic on javascript are working on the HTML5 canvas implementations.
I don't think Flash game dev's will move to HTML5 in 5 or 8 years. Flash will still be more interesting.
I think that depends on whether Adobe makes the judgment call as to whether its more important to keep their Flash tools on top or not. If they conclude that the future is HTML5, they will bring their Flash/Flex/Air dev tools to be first class development environments for targeting HTML5 canvas; rather than being marginalized and losing their market share to a competitor in web animation authoring. Or perhaps they'll choose to compete on the platform itself, so they can own it. Time will tell.
Owning the APIs has proven time after time to be where the money is at. Microsoft has written that in stone. If there's one thing Steve Jobs, et. al. have learned, is: don't sit on your ass and let somebody else run away with your golden goose. They let Microsoft run away with it once. So did IBM. Which is why he gets it, the lesson is learned - if you let another platform take over your device, you lose any control over the quality of the experience.
You go on about 'we're developers we just want to provide a tool'. Do you really trust your non-developer (maybe you forget once upon a time, Jobs wrote software too) executives at Adobe don't get the power they have to mint money with their platform? To open their own open app store? To begin to charge a per-end-user licensing fee for the next version of the flash compiler for the iphone, once its indispensible?
Let's look at the facts. There's tons and tons of people out there that have some Flash experience and some with actual professional training, and lots without either that can manage to produce something with Flash. Let's call these Flash people "flashies". I'm not comfortable calling them developers, programmers or coders, out of respect to the people that really are. Some very well may be, but if we're going to draw a Venn diagram of Flashies, we all know that's a fairly small percentage of the set that gets to overlap into Software Engineer or Developer. I'm taking the middle road, nothing derogatory.
So these Flashies are out there; they can pound out some moving pictures and stitch it together to do something. Great. See what's happened in Android? You've got a load of crap out there. Steve doesn't like a load of crap. He's trying to do something different than the load of crap permeating the Microsoft ecosystem.
Also, I really appreciate your remarks about how open the Adobe culture is, when obivously your boss said, edit that shit on your blog right now, even if you did say, its' my own personal opinion.
So you are the SWF evangelist. You have drunk the SWF kool-aid. I suppose I might have drunk the Tim Berners-Lee kool-aid. Your platform is not an open standard. Nobody has to give it due respect just because the tools are easy to get started on. Just like some people are visual learners, some are visual Flashies. Cool, y'all seem to have developed a tool to target SWF whether a Flashie is visual, ore more technical. That's neat. You're tools are pretty cool. It would be cooler if you'd open your format up. I know, that would allow competitors an even keel to compete with you on your tools, but hey, that's better for Flashies.
You aren't just buildling the tools. You are selling a proprietary platform too. So is Apple. A lot of their code is open source, and free software at that. And a lot of it isn't. They are competing against RIM & Microsoft and Google for all the marbles right now. Adobe is on all of their radars now as coming hard after the platform. You don't think the Adobe executives let the Flash team go and spend all that development time on the compiler out of the goodness of their hearts, or because it would be paid for by selling the tools to developers. No, there's a lot more craft in the economics of that business decision.
Also, you guys could be bought by Microsoft or Google tomorrow or two years from now, and really fuck Apple in the ass. The scenario: lots of great killer apps are running on your SDK for the iPhone, the apple sdk is no longer in the mindshare of developers... then Microsoft or Google, hai, we bought it, dead now. *poof* the app marketplace is disrupted and the platform dies. Your market cap of $20 billion dollars is fuck you money to those guys. Sorry.
Yeah, when there's this much money involved, and the dynamics are such: it's happened before and it will happen again. All the strategy thinkers at Adobe, Apple, RIM, Google, and Microsoft have learned the lessons from mistakes made by Apple and IBM in launching, and letting platform be marginalized or wrested by a third-party partner.
So there you go. Free software is the antithesis of this propreitary ecosystem. You want software, and licensing to put the needs and desires of developers and users first? I'm not going to get upset when one propreitary player has the balls to have learned from their own mistakes of over 25 years ago. No, I'm confident that all this great research being done now will be free from patents for my children and grandchildren, so they will have really great unencumbered free software. Sure, they may still pay a provider to help them keep it current with new ideas and revisions to old ones, learn how to use it, or bundle a great distribution of it together. Or for really complex software, hire consultants to implement it, and optimize it, and integrate it into the business processes that fit your stategy. That's cool. That's paying people to get shit done too.
I propose that we cease our never-ending war on drugs, quit policing the world, and drop our silly security theater in airports and plow the billions we spend there into medical research.
Meh. Enough already with the medical research. There's plenty of market incentive there as it is. Let's spend it on physics research, where globalization has really cut back massively on research dollars by private firms.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth