Well, you always have time to change. Thinking you can't gets you into a negative spiral downwards, and to be honest is also false. When I was starting to run I talked with a 55year old guy who ran a marathon once a year about it being difficult for me to start since I didn't have any experience. He casually told me it was hard for him too when he started 5years ago. He never did any sports prior and had to start from scratch at 50... I realize now 'not being able to' is actually 99% of the time all in your head. Just find a way to start easy and keep going...
I said goodbye too recently. After dealing with slow performance, a lot of crashes and high memory usage on my machines I started looking around for other options. That also took care of the worries I had about the very questionable choices Ubuntu/Canonical made the last few years, but it's still quite sad to see it driving towards a cliff.
I have arch linux running now and while arch is not known for it's stability, I have far fewer applications crashing nowadays.
Whenever this issue pops up I always imagine Fabien Potencier (while he's no dictator, he has a very clear path) taking over the php source and change it according to his vision. Then I imagine going back to the first php script I ever wrote and how if I would have been able to create it with the changes. I can honestly say I can imagine it would have been a lot harder to do and there is a big chance that I would have given up because I can imagine him going into full OO mode. Don't think I don't like Fabien, for me personally his php version would probably be a lot better, but also a lot harder for new users.
This is one of the best things of php: it's easy enough for new developers and you can grow into the OO aspects of it. While I must admit I would also like a big cleanup to make the function names and arguments more uniform, I don't hope they change anything that makes it harder to begin with php or limit the possibilities to grow.
This is the difference between a regular company and a company with a great atmosphere. It might seem a waste to some people but building an atmosphere like this makes me want to work at github. And that's a very big advantage in the tech industry.
It's quite shocking how little you _have_ to give employees, but in the end people will not be very happy if you only care about the number of hours spend at the office and not about the person spending them there. Also; things like this are a great way to encourage your employees to think differently and get their creative juices flowing.
Just a minor point of criticism; require and include are statements, not functions. Not that it's a big deal or something, but I just thought I would let you know.
Most of the comments seem so negative... When I was 16 I was also interested in OS development and actually wrote a bootsector, a very small kernel and support for fat12 in assembler. Previous experience? Basic and QBasic. It's quite a good way to learn and it is possible when you take one step at a time and are willing to spend some time reading... Your mind is a great tool, have some faith in it.
The most interesting fact for this swing is that it's not only software that is changing...
As noted in the article: if you wanted a computer in the old days, you put it together yourself. That changed and putting together a new computer yourself is unimaginable (I'm not speaking about assembly of components, but soldering the whole thing). Recently cheap(er) 3D printing, Arduino and the Raspberry Pi put hardware on the table again and I think very interesting times are coming. Think about it, even 2 or 3 years ago 'innovation' on the internet was synonym with software, now it's changing again to hard- and software.
Not at all. Hardware is becoming more and more obscure. 5 years ago many people could and did swap components in their PC. Now try doing that with a modern smartphone or laptop.
Don't confuse the chatterings online about RPi etc with any kind of general movement. The vast majority of computer users now use sealed hardware boxes, and that proportion is increasing.
Do we care? I'm personally much happier with open software and formats, but my Ubuntu laptop can easily read a .docx written by MS Office a Windows 8 machine. I can run many programs and games under WINE. And I can still tweak whatever I like. Meanwhile, people too busy, uninterested, and uneducated to want to change anything can use a simple, elegant, functional platform.
As long as our software is continually developed and is supported (which is why UEFI is so scary), I don't see why we should object to black box computers.
5 years ago many people could and did swap components in their PC. Now try doing that with a modern smartphone or laptop.
Do you think this is an entirely new development? Wouldn't the statement "5 years ago people could do X with computers, now they can't" in fact hold true for the last, say, 40 years in the history of computing?
Well, Rpi etc could lead the way. Not as they are of course, but that could improve.
One way I can think of is memristors, which could make FPGA-like hardware ubiquitous. This would push the software/hardware frontier so low that there would be effectively little magic left.
I see your point with the 3d printing revolution but imho the two most important sentences in the article are:
The line between ‘computer’, ‘program’ and ‘media’ blurred to the point where consumers were successfully confused about what it was they were actually buying.
... another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on and where the act of programming will be as tightly regulated as the export of cryptography was.
So if you look at it closely: This swing is not only about hardware and software anymore. It is much more about data and the services that it enables. Think of facebook, google etc.
In fact the GPU on the rPi doesn't even have open source drivers or a public specification, you have to use the provided binary blob if you want all the goodies.
Very nice, my initial impression was this is a service I want to use and I hope people will use.
The only problem I see is signup with facebook, to be perfectly honest that's the reason you don't have a user extra (mine). While I do understand the choice, I think you should provide an alternative signup option.
It's also a bit unclear how much I get to keep when a user pays 25cents and how/when the money will reach me, if I would be implementing minno as a payment option I'd like to know...
For now, we're restricting sign-up to Facebook because it 1) allows for really easy signup, 2) reduces password friction to simplify purchases, and 3) helps us reduce fraudulent signups. As the business grows, we will certainly open it to alternative signup options, but for now, Facebook is the only option.
During our beta period, we're offering completely free transactions to all of our partners. This means that if a user pays $0.25 for your digital good/service, you will receive $0.25 :)
If you have any other questions, feel free to email me directly at calvin@minno.co--I'd be glad to help!
As an Ubuntu user since day one I don't like the way the distro is going. As some other users said before, the UI is not that great and lately I've seen ridiculous 'fixes' for bad decisions. For example: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/notify-osd/+bug/46...
This is seen as a feature, it's basically a top right growl style notification bubble, but they added an 100px top offset so it wouldn't interfere with other applications. Why? Because the user can not click the notifications away, they have a delay and waiting is the only way to remove those bubbles. This has to be one of the worst decisions ever. Look at growl/OSX, it works. In this case it's fine to copy a feature and not try to be different.
Another thing I absolutely don't understand is all the media/audio frameworks there have been since 4.10 (not really an Ubuntu only problem), why not stick with one that just works? IMHO, Ubuntu should experiment all they want with unity, notify-osd, placing window buttons to the left, ... but please, just provide a basic install option that just works without all the fancy new stuff (that is probably thrown out soon anyway because something else comes up).
Just make it work. Steve Jobs seems to be able to impose decisions on a large group of people, but he also seems to have thought about most things really really well. Lately Ubuntu seems to adopt everything as long as it doesn't look like something everybody else has.
Sorry if I'm ranting, but as an Ubuntu lover the last few years have been a serious disappointment.
