- Mom: *sigh* The flight to Dubai takes so long.
- Me: C'mon, it's not that long. You can try to sleep, you can read a book or use your laptop...
- Mom: I can use my laptop?
- Me: Sure!
- Mom: But I'm not online, am I?
- Me: No.
- Mom: Then, what shall I do with it?
“What I think [John Gruber] is getting at is the sentiment embodied by already announced products like the Litl and Google’s Chrome OS. This is the middle ground between the desktop and mobile software platforms, which makes perfect sense for a hardware device that fills a similar position.– John Siracusa in Antacid tablet
The “reconception” part comes in when you consider how many people really need the power—and the complexity that comes with it—of a desktop platform, and in what situations. As a computer geek watching the Chrome OS introduction video, it’s hard not to think about how much easier some people’s lives would be (hi Mom and Dad) if they could trade technical complexities they don’t care about for vastly increased simplicity and ease of use.”
“–”
- In fact, as far as I can tell the “desktop OS” is basically a failure. Outside of computer professionals and “graphic designers,” most people just want to start their web browser. They can barely use the rest of their operating system past that — and they don’t want or need to, either.
- So building computers that are designed to do one thing, run a web browser, incredibly, and do it insanely well, is a great idea.
Whisky Van Gogh Go: why ChromeOS is a great idea
I believe there are millions of users out there that have a personal computer and only use it for doing stuff on the internet. And even if they do something else, using a classic desktop application - like writing the occasional letter in MS Word f.e. - there is already a web application for this. These users don’t need an expensive, full-featured computer with lots of storage and processing power to accomplish their tasks.
I like the theme in movies when people realize their lives are finite and/or they are given just a short time left to live. Particularly interesting is what they do with that limited time…
“Fear mongering is a lousy profession, one that ought to be regulated, if not banned. I’m more in favor of hope mongering. 2010 is the year that the world will change. In fact, every year is that year, but this is the only time we’ll get to change the world this time.”– Seth’s Blog: Is there a fear shortage?
2009 Ruby survey results
Here are some interesting survey results. “What other languages are Ruby developers familiar with? How do they code? What tools do they use?”
These and more questions have been answered by more than 1000 participants.
Below, you can read a summary of the results and/or visit the individual result pages which include all the details (what I recommend):
- Demographic results
- Results on code formatting related questions
- Answers on programming style: part 1 and part 2
- Database results
- Answers to questions on view-code
- Documentation question results
Here is an excerpt from the original post by thoughtbot-giantrobots summarizing the results:
Thanks to the 1000+ developers who participated in our ruby community survey a few weeks back.
Here are the results as we head into 2010.
There are result reports linked to from within each section, and this post does not comprehensively list all the results, so click through if you’re interested.
Demographics
The demographics results show that PHP (36%) and Java (22%) are the dominant “prior languages” of many ruby developers. Notably, we left out Python. Sorry python folks.
We also see that more than half the people who took the survey work on ruby professionally on a small team.
Textmate (51%) wins the editor battle, with vim (21%) in second place - and “Distributed VCS” (git, hg, etc) dominates (83%) the version control section. I’m sure that credit and thanks are due to the github team for building a product which makes using a great VCS tool even better.
Formatting
The results show that in regard to an 80 character line limit, the “modern displays are wide enough to not enforce a limit” position wins out, though not with a majority. The questions about keyword spacing, and blank lines are fairly evenly split. A solid 75% of people always use parentheses on method definition — maybe enough to justify criticizing people who don’t?
Style
The results (part 1, part 2) show a strong preference for “self.method_name” over “class « self” for class method definitions and for only using exceptions in exceptional situations.
Database
The results show that a slight majority prefer to disallow null in boolean columns — but most are willing to allow NULL in Integer and String columns. Results are split on adding indexing “only when performance issue” vs proactively adding them to foreign key columns ahead of time.
Views and Rails
The results that many people use a shared folder for “global partials”, and show little consensus on how/where to send email from. I think this question got the most “other” replies — let us know how else you’re sending email in the comments.
Documentation
The results show that ruby programmers prefer meaningful variable names, and only like to document code when it’s complex and needs explanation. Almost 80% have committed a code change which effects only code formatting and not functionality.
Wrapup
Maybe most encouragingly, when asked about whether the types of questions in the survey mattered or were a huge waste of time, nearly 90% chose the “I think it’s worth caring about your craft, and these questions are professionally relevant” option. From our experience at conferences and user group events, that seems consistent with the commitment to quality and best practices that exists in the ruby community.
“A broad swath of psychological and economic research has argued that people will pay different amounts for the same item depending on who is providing it. The economist Richard Thaler, in his 1985 “Beer on the Beach” study, showed that a thirsty sunbather would pay $2.65 for a beer delivered from a resort hotel but only $1.50 for the same beer if it came from a shabby grocery store.”– Stephen J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt in “Freakonomics”
nikf:
Pixar Short “Lifted” - as seen prior to Ratatouille.
The UI designer of that panel is definitely not a genius! ;-)
Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5 Comic Strip
Since the official announcement of W3C to stop working on the development of XHTML 2 in the end of 2009 and increase resources on HTML 5 instead, there has been a lot of confusion and various debates about the “proper”markup language for modern and future web-development. With XHTML 1.0, XHTML 2, HTML 4, HTML 5 and XHTML 5 we have so many languages that it’s really getting hard to keep track!
Another comic explaining technology. I like comics like these. They often give a simple, focused and therefor easy to understand introduction on a topic. It’s not just for kids, you know. ;-)
Be sure to click through to see the whole comic!
Very cool. Google has made a comic book to explain their open sourced Chromium OS.
I think the book is more about the browser than the OS, but it’s a great read anyway.
I especially like the chapter about Search and User Experience (of course).
Seven years gone
Seven years from now, what will you have to show for what you’re doing right now?
If your answer is, “not much,” perhaps you should consider a new plan, one that might generate a different answer, or, at the very least, be a more fun way to waste seven years.
I am always getting kind of a strange feeling when thinking about the universe and the fact how tiny our world is. And I am asking myself the question: ‘What does really matter?’
This video made me think about that - once again.
Basically, my conclusion is always, that “life” does. I should make good use of the time I am alive and don’t waste time on things I shouldn’t or don’t want to do.
Now that’s always a good new year’s resolution, too: do less of the stuff you don’t want to do and do more of the stuff you like to do (this also includes trying something new!).
Happy new year!
STEVE JOBS AT HOME IN 1982 — “This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.” — Steve Jobs
(via Diana Walker: The Bigger Picture Gallery (December 2007) - The Digital Journalist)
(via marco)
Surrounded by lights
One good example for what an extreme wide angle lens is good for!
Taken with my Nikon D40 and the Sigma 10-20mm lens @10mm. It’s inside a tree of lights.
A lens as wide as this gives you the ability to capture interesting views inside narrow interiors.
Shot from the hip, to get even more on the picture. (I wasn’t comfortable lying on the ground or setting up a tripod; it was too crowded under there.)