My theory would be that choosing a non-existing word for the name instantly created a brand, whereas before it had just been an anonymous app with a name that referred to what it did.
Who writes the drivers for this software that 'Just Works'?
Over and over again I see commercial OS vendors implicitly credited for writing drivers that were actually supplied by the hardware manufacturers themselves.
The vast majority of the general population find that their Windows and OS X machines 'Just Work' because they come preconfigured with all of the manufacturer's drivers already installed.
Linux can't 'Just Work' in the Desktop space because:
1. It doesn't have majority market share (like Microsoft), so not all hardware manufacturers will make it a priority for their hardware to have good Linux drivers.
2. It doesn't control the hardware platform (like Apple), so it is likely that a significant proportion of users will have machines that have unsupported / badly supported hardware.
Any language that is only pure is about as useful as write-only memory.
Haskell was historically pure and had side effects added as a way to interact with the world. The language enforces (discounting unsafePerformIO) the separation of pure and impure code. That is sufficient to label any practical language pure.
> Any language that is only pure is about as useful as write-only memory.
That's actually not true -- you can write the core of a system in a pure language, then use that pure core as a library in larger applications. Pure languages like Coq and Agda are often not Turing-complete, so various sorts of verification and proofs can be applied more easily.
There are a lot of design patterns for object oriented programming that were created specifically to overcome structural flaws in C++ and Java. These simply don't apply to some languages.
Dependency Injection is not one of these and actually has widespread applicability. Although the name always sounds wrong to me since it makes me think of dependency creep, one of the problems that it is intended to alleviate.
Design patterns have gained an "enterprisey" reputation because much of the time they are represented as if each one is a universal, language agnostic solution. They reek of cargo cult management.
Every language and/or ecosystem will have its own set of effective design patterns that will partially overlap with those of other ecosystems. Some communities care more about making names for the patterns, which could in itself be considered enterprisey.
Interestingly enough, the person that first told me about design patterns was a Python hacker.
The value comes from eliminating electromagnetic crosstalk and reducing the amount of PCB real estate dedicated to those buses. A single line of fiber can outperform several lines of copper, is made of cheaper material and sidesteps a whole swathe of engineering challenges (resonance, power dissipation, synchronization of signals across multiple lines etc.)
"sidesteps a whole swathe of engineering challenges"
Isn't it funny that as time marches on and certain technologies improve, that other areas become much simpler and cheaper to deal with. I can imagine that components such as this making it easier for more engineers and hobbyists getting into electronics, embedded systems, etc.. because of this.
As a kid my parents had one of those fiber optic swans you put water in and set atop a "light bulb"; this was in the early 80s or late 70s and I thought at the time (being a geek and familiar with RF) that this fiber optic technology is going to have long reaching ramifications in a good way...
> I can imagine that components such as this making it easier for more engineers and hobbyists getting into electronics, embedded systems, etc.. because of this.
Easier ??? If anything it will make it unbelievably much harder, just like VLSI chips are harder to interface to for hobby purposes than TTL and soldering SMD is an art, but 1/10th" pitch can be done by anybody that isn't legally blind.
As tech has steadily advanced over the years the entry level skills required have gone up dramatically.
I found it fascinating and shows the development from first concept through research phases to practical/commercial uses. It's a few years old now, but should be good for a lot of information anyway.
I find it interesting that he compares the value of phone apps to the value of the mobile web. There are thousands more apps than the user can process, and the majority of apps that the user downloads will be abandoned/forgotten within a few hours/days.
It sounds a lot like the internet in general, to the extent that App stores could be considered a transient analogue to a gated internet. Thousands of apps/sites all struggling to attract the attention of users.
I'm not sure that the Inception on Fisher Jr. ever actually occurs, as I doubt that Cobb ever escaped Saito's dream from the beginning.
It is suggested in the movie that the subconscious attacks the architect of the dream first. In the beginning of the movie the last we see of the first architect is him being bundled away by Saito's goons.
Saito then crafts an excuse for Cobb to end up at peace, lost in his own subconscious. The Saito living in limbo could be a projection in the same way that Fisher Jr. creates a projection of the guy the forger was mimicking.
