First off - most people in any entertainment industry - music , books , comedy etc. are not making megabucks. Most of them earn somewhere between an ok wage and a pretty rubbish one.
However there are plenty of people experimenting like Louie C K is up and down the spectrum. I buy lots of stuff from people who are doing their own thing. To pick some random smaller examples - http://www.dgmlive.com - King Crimson and Robert Fripp, Matt Stevens http://www.mattstevensguitar.com and Richard Skelton http://www.sustain-release.co.uk/
Do they make megabucks? of course not but they are making a living.
The question actually is - are they getting more return for their work than if they used more traditional channels and I think all would argue that they are.
Not only is this approach sustainable - it's going to become essential for all but the most mainstream. Louie CK and Radio head possibly suggest that even the more mainstream will do better doing it on their own terms.
I wouldn't sasume it has been ruled out - people (myself included) sometimes get mentally stuck on one solution and fail to spot another obvious avenue.
Heh heh. When I learned about computer science in school it was punched cards, and then later on VAXs. The theory and the Unix stuff came in useful though.
Seriously though I left education 24 years ago and now looking back that was pretty much the period of lowest density learning I've ever had. Since I left education I have been learning constantly.
As an employer the main things I need you to come to me with from your education is: how to research things on your own, how to learn new stuff without being spoon fed and if possible some good solid and broad theoretical knowledge. You will pick up source control and all that stuff up from your co-workers.
I'm not sure that this actualy means anything. Just a pragmatic move while they get the pro features into FCPX.
I guess if there is any hidden message it might be that they are wanting to keep the pro's onside - which might be good news for the direction of FCP and Logic.
(also to note that there is nothing actually wrong with FCPX - I'm using it everyday working on some marketing materials right now. I can see that Pros are missing some features which is fair enough but it's an extremely usable application and I'm finding it very friction free to work in)
Do you know what - in my house I have a number of machines. They do things like cleaning clothes and dishes and making food hotter. They all have microprocessors in them and can do quite sophisticated stuff - but their interface - almost always a single dial. And that's great because I don't actually care how they do it I just want the job done. Yes I am technically capable of getting in their and reprograming the chips but why would I?
And this is the thing - there is no reason why half the things on my computer should be hard. When I am working with documents (text , video , music , etc) then I just want to easily open the document and work on it. I want backups to be trivial etc. etc. And what is more 99% of users want this and only this.
But the great thing about the mac is that if you look at the SDKs there is ever more sophistiation and "cool" stuff for us developers. Terminal had a lot of love this time round, Xcode might not have the greatest UI but it also gets a lot of attention - Apple take developers seriously
It doesn't bother me that my computer is powerful and easy to use. I don't think this is a bad thing and I also think all the people reading into this "oh the mac is going to just be for idiots" are idiots themselves: go and download the SDKs and XCode and then tell me that Apple are dumbing down
I do think that Apple are moving away from the "pro" market BTW - they have their sights on something much more interesting - the pervasive computing future when most of our computing needs are met by a cloud of little machines. I already love that I can walk into a room in my house and flick up stuff from my phone or ipad onto my TV or walk into another room and make music appear from said phone or iPad. There will come a day when your "computer" is a coming together of screen , processor unit and keyboard and when you get up taking the processor with you that computer is no longer physically there until next time you come past. We are going to see this in the video game world too - we aren't far from an ipad or iphone that is your portable gaming device and when you are near your TV is your console and when you are with your mates is your lan party (with or without screens and speakers) - and if Microsoft and Sony aren't paying attention they will loose the entire market overnight
1) dive in help her, pay up make it all good get good PR. BUT if they are thinking that this is going to be a common problem and going to happen a lot then they may be making rod for their own backs…
or
2) Ride the storm - which again you would only do if you thought this was going to be an ongoing issue
or
3) they are idiots and have no idea how to handle PR (just like I wouldn't hire a project manager who hadn't been on a serious failed project I wouldn't hire PR who hadn't weathered some sort of shit storm)
None of those choices speak well for Airbnb's value - either this is going to be a problem for their business model or they aren't experienced enough to run something like this…
to be fair if it's (3) I'm sure they are getting some pretty good learning in right now
I do get tired of these "recieved wisdom" nuggets as seen in the headline here - see also "ipad is for consuming only" and "linux not suitable for desktop" (although that one seems to have died a death) etc. etc. and of course the actual article is a rather mundane overview of one or two of the features
Since I'm here: is Lion turning into iOS - no. I'm finding it makes me even more effective - I fly round my Air like I can fly round my source code with Vim. I find the gestures and the trackpad make a mouse feel like a clumsy ancient thing, Launchpad is acutally not too bad sometimes - gesture tap is quicker than ctrl-space typing enter (I use launchbar now - switched from quicksilver when it was going through rough times). Mission control, or whatever it's called, is much better than spaces and expose - I love the re-arrange spaces so apps I alt-tab between are close to each other. I find that full screen and focusing on a single task is much better for my concentraion - and was something I've been trying to do since long before I got Lion.
this is actually a power users update whatever you might hear
This isn't really suprising. Even the large banks would do this if they could get away with it. Look at the Goldman Sachs high frequency trading stuff - even if it wasn't illegal they were sailing as close to the wind as they possibly could.
Trust is going to become a massive issue in the future - just as "privacy" and "digital rights" are at the moment if we have any desire to move away from the large institutions and governmental regulation that we currently use to "solve" these problems. Quotes because it's not a great solution - see Enron for example.
It's great that things like Bitcoin are being tried - but we should also be clear that this is the wild west. Dealing with banking and trading in a totally unregulated environment. I would hope that the lessons that the finance industries learned the hard way and that led to audits and regulation and other instruments can be leveraged. Otherwise we are doomed to reinvent the whole industry all over again....
I've been programming since '81 and commercially since '88.
Books, magazines (remember typing in example programs!) , undoubtedly re-invented many more wheels than I do now, colleagues, CIX (remember that BBS in the UK?), looking at open source code, I wrote a warren abstract machine (Prolog interpreter) back in the day and a regular expression engine and for both of those spent a lot of time in the university library (had long since left but still lived near it). Just because it wasn't a click away didn't mean that the information was not there.
But most of my code now still comes out of my head. The times I search for code are when I know that someone must have solved this problem already.
I fully agree projection figures are guesses, likely to show the situation in a good light, and as much use as a guide to the future as a random line drawn on a bit of paper.
BUT
that is not all that makes up a projection. The interesting and useful information is what assumptions have gone into making the projections, what understanding of the market is present etc. etc. By questioning the creator of the business plans about all of this you can rapidly find out if they understand their business, their market place and their competition.
(I'm not sure how this scales - but for small companies it's critical information. However it certainly works in some situations - IDC are projecting that Microsoft and Nokia will once again be a dominant force in mobile phones, reading the article their assumption seems to be that, Microsoft and Nokia have been dominant in the past and therefore, despite a changing market and any damage they have seemingly done to their own companies, they will be again. Having identified it I can now evaluate that assumption on it's own merits. With a small company this may well be more hidden. Another great example comes to mind: the work song nano cluster episode of Big Bang Theory when Sheldon points out that Penny's business plan will result in her earning considerably less than minimum wage)
Projections are not useless - they tell you what people are thinking and how well they understand key things needed to make it succeed. Just don't treat them as actual predictions of the future.
This strategy worked out really well for C# as a response to Java. At first it seemed just like a spoiling move but somewhere a long the way c# turned into the better language.
So you can't blame them for giving the strategy another whirl
Well it looks like they have already done something better than all their non-Apple competitors - instead of rushing it out half finished they seem to have waited until it's done. Given the biggest complaint about webos on the phone was the power of the processor this stands a good chance of being a nice product. fingers crossed for them
(I'm unlikely to give up my iPad given iCloud now but there really should be a decent competitor in the market place)
((and by decent I mean something a casual purchaser will be happy with and not a tablet that is good enough to make someone happy who pointedly doesn't want to buy Apple and will put up with all sorts))
I think your editorial headline doesn't really do them service. They made an entirely rational business decision based on prevailing conditions. They sound more disappointed than pissed to me.
ah bless. Apple product announcement and all the websites and bloggers and journalists are scratching their heads.
"How can I turn this into page views. Gee the overview of what he said - been done a million times. What about slagging it all off - well it is pretty interesting stuff though. I know. I'll come up with a trolling headline and use some tricksy language making myself look cool so it's not really slagging them off at all. hmm. got it. Redefine innovate to mean first one ever to think of an idea. Bingo. "
"Damm. Better start thinking about the next release......"
I worked for a chap in Yorkshire who had been a miner and had lost his job in the Thatchers war against the miners. He'd taken his redundancy money and taught himself to program.
However there are plenty of people experimenting like Louie C K is up and down the spectrum. I buy lots of stuff from people who are doing their own thing. To pick some random smaller examples - http://www.dgmlive.com - King Crimson and Robert Fripp, Matt Stevens http://www.mattstevensguitar.com and Richard Skelton http://www.sustain-release.co.uk/
Do they make megabucks? of course not but they are making a living.
The question actually is - are they getting more return for their work than if they used more traditional channels and I think all would argue that they are.
Not only is this approach sustainable - it's going to become essential for all but the most mainstream. Louie CK and Radio head possibly suggest that even the more mainstream will do better doing it on their own terms.