I think that there are a lot fewer people using that feature than you'd assume. Even lots of developer coworkers don't know about that ability, even fewer use it. So I can't imagine there are a lot of non-techie people out there doing [email protected].
Just to nitpick, the article says aggregates have been in SQL for 3 or 4 decades, but SQL wasn't an ANSI standard until 1986 (28 years ago, almost 3 decades.) I get that a language exists before it is standardized, so were aggregates in SQL in the 70s/ early 80s or is this just a hyperbolic statement?
100% this. I spent the first 12 years of my career not writing a single line of production JavaScript or CSS. I did it on the side for my own purposes, but never professionally. Why? I didn't want to. (I still don't really want to, but I like the job I'm at more than I like writing JUST server side code.)
So am I a front end developer? No. Will I be in a week, month, year? No. Why, I DON'T WANT TO BE. Can I use js to manipulate the DOM? Yes. Have I used Backbone.js and Angular and others? Yes. But I will only mention that technology in passing, to show "Hey look, I learn new things"
I think it goes with the territory. In a lot of senses, this guy gave up his personhood and became a corporation. The things we take for granted as individuals he puts before the board.
For example, he was able to convince them that he wanted to date the second girl, but that's not something any of us have likely had to deal with. The one exception being if you're still at home and you try to convince your parents you want to date a specific person.
In that context, the statement was a little chilling, but no more so (to me) than all the other decisions. The entire thing was chilling to me.
I would guess it's similar to Atwood and his new Discourse platform. It looks nice, and developers & designers get excited about it. But one reason forum software hasn't been dramatically overhauled in the last 10-15 years is because it's working for most people.
I've sold plenty of junk on craigslist and I've bought a few things from there as well. I did the same thing with Freecycle and Cheapcycle when we lived in a town that did those. None of those were glamorous. In addition, the people I met there were from all walks of life.
I get why startups think CL is ugly and not useful, but go do a UI overhaul and sit back for the barrage of hate that is going to come from the core users.
I get nervous every time the federal gov't tries to mandate things in school. It always seems like something from either the 50 facts & fallacies of software development and/or the mythical man month. It's as if they realize things are screwed up so they try to slap some tape on the side and hope that fixes it.
Problem for me wasn't so much my manager. He did a good job, as far as he could. It was higher than him. But the last job I left was due to management.
I essentially did this throughout my college career. I don't think it was 5pm, though, more often 7pm. What set me off was getting so frustrated one night doing Calculus at 10pm. I tend to need 8+ hours of sleep per night, so by 10 I wasn't in the best mood for studying.
It got easier once I moved out of the dorms. I'd have most (if not all) of my work done by supper and finish up a little bit after. I studied Saturdays but not Sundays. That left my nights open for things like irc or setting Red Hat up on my machine.
I found I was a lot less stressed than my friends that played N64 all day and STARTED studying at 8pm.
My favorite part was the 3 primary & 3 secondary factors they looked at to identify. So if the people doing this can tweak those factors it will help them out.
So you didn't "accidentally" hire people. You did it with a lack of foresight. To me, that's different.
Saying you accidentally hired people makes it sound softer than it really is. If Raytheon or Boeing hired 2,000 people ahead of a defense contract they were sure they'd get, and didn't that wouldn't be an "accident." That would be poor planning (counting your eggs before they hatch kind of thing.)
Either way, I don't really care either way about Zynga. I don't think I've ever played their games, but at the same time I'm not hoping they fail.
That's a fair point. But I think if you look at most non-startup companies that stay around for 3-4 years they don't typically have the valuations that the startups do in the same time.
For example, Joe's Plumbing shuts down after 2 years because Joe realizes he has to manage his books, do advertising, manage any junior plumbers etc. In the end he spends 50% of his time doing plumbing and 50% of his time doing "business." So he pays off his small business loan (maybe) of $100k and goes to work for Tom's Plumbing where at least he gets to do plumbing all the time.
He had a run of 2 years, but at no point was his company sitting on millions of dollars.
Interesting thing is that even if it's the end of the line for Microsoft developing new versions of Windows(and I don't think it is), there is still an entire ecosystem that won't be going anywhere.
I'm working for a client right now writing a few apps (away from Access/Excel type apps) so that they can upgrade to Windows 7 by mid-year 2013. And they're upgrading from XP.
So even if Windows 9 never comes out, I would guess there is plenty of work for Windows developers (for better or worse.)
I doubt it. In fact, I think of the majority of the people I know if they were to try and download Tweetbot and couldn't, they'll be mad at Tweetbot.
Even if Tweetbot states something like "Twitter has limited the number of clients we can sell" they'll still think Tweetbot is stupid. But most of them won't think "I wonder if there is a way around this." And then head to some warez type solution.
Instead they'll look and see if there is an alternative, or more likely, just stick with Twitter's website.
I just don't buy the "This will drive people to pirated software" argument.
That was my thought. As I was reading this, the voice in my head said "Run! Run for the hills!"