I find a large part of depression is not being able to recognize the "sometimes" aspect of your second point. The author isn't pushing happy rainbows - "any time I was struggling, any time depression and anxiety overwhelmed me" -- it's about how difficult depression makes it to see a way through the shitty periods.
The entire premise of this argument is flawed. Cost of capital (or even of shipping) likely has nothing to do with the decision:
- the value of an extra 25 days of product development for one of the most successful consumer products in the world exceeds shipping costs by orders of magnitude
- $20M is completely negligible on $58B revenue. 0.03% or so. It would be insane to wait 25 days over that.
Another resource that has existed for a while is the "Integrated Public Use Microdata Series". Though I don't think they have an API, they do provide a vast amount of data and have tools for online analysis.
Though not necessarily their goal, a side of this story you don't mention is income via royalties. I have worked with multiple Bell labs alumnus who are financially very secure in part because of their work there.
As much as software patents irk common sense, the notion of IP protection really does seem reasonable here. There are people who do research for reasons beyond personal profit. They actually do deserve licensing fees.
> Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real intelligence or understanding.
Cheating at solitaire? Of course you can go through the motions, but for the money (even public) education costs, that seems like quite a waste of opportunity.
Half a century later the change isn't from assembly to an actually useful level of abstraction. The bullshit-o-meter is damped further when half the document shows code examples that would be much more difficult in assembly.
It's especially brutal that people involved in tech believe they're changing ("improving") the world yet decide gender determines skill.
What really matters: the people without prejudice - who will hire/work with talented engineers regardless of gender or race - will have an advantage via a larger talent pool.
I'm not convinced it's a shame. As a freshmen, with only a small amount of previous programming experience, I didn't appreciate the beauty of abstraction or the elegance of the ideas presented.
A few years later, though, and I understand why it's a revered text. While there is something to be said for learning the fundamentals of computer science before bad habits are formed, it seems that the real messages are often lost in the hands of first-time CS students (which is probably over half the Berkeley freshmen EECS class).
That said, I haven't been through the alternative and I can't vouch for it.
This occurs every Apple release. Not to dismiss any of his accomplishments, but it's clear that he could acquire the product without a publicity stunt.
It's also surprising that the author credits Intel with the invention of ISAs. Sure, x86 is now the dominant ISA in many markets, but the notion of abstraction from hardware implementation was around for at least 10 years before the 8086 processor (IBM 360).