Joey deVilla

>Apple focused on profitability.

Quite the contrary. Apple focuses on experience - and knows that if you deliver a kick ass experience, profit will naturally follow.

Apple also is one of the few tech companies that seems to be willing to say "no" and not be all things to all people. It's often misinterpreted as only targeting the profitable markets, as if that's a bad thing. Not pursuing unprofitable markets seems to be common sense to me - call me crazy!

Microsoft of the 80's and 90's focused on profitability and chasing relentless backwards compatibility; and it worked - for a while. Until you had the Windows division actively undermining other portions of the organization it saw as competition.
Memes like this are no accident: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big-tech-companies-plus-an-enhancement/

Then the next wave of computing - mobile happened and they suddenly were on the outside looking in. Much like the likes of DEC, Prime and heck even SUN were when the PC revolution happened and dethroned mini's.

As for baseband chips - radio is freakishly unforgiving. Apple did buy Intels baseband modem operation lock stock and barrel, so in three to five years - who knows? They certainly are motivated and have the resources to make a solid go of it. And they have certainly proven they can expand their expertise rather competently when they are motivated to. I don't think the Swiss are as dismissive of the Apple watch as they initially were;…

This reminds me of a story that I heard last summer,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603414

later confirmed here on HN by the hiring supervisor who observed the problem,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4919749

that many CS grads, even CS grads with master's degrees, can't get through a hiring screen that includes the question, "Write a loop that displays the numbers 1 to 100." Yes, something that simple is something too hard for many computer science graduates who are seeking jobs after graduation.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you can't suppose that a computer science degree indicates ANYTHING about a job applicant's suitability to work for you. If you want to hire a programmer who will program well for you, test the job applicant's programming skill during the hiring process by having the applicant do a sample of the work you expect the programmer to do after the programmer is hired. In general, for hiring for any job, don't worry about degrees, but be sure to ask for a work-sample test.

References for why it's a good idea to hire on the basis of work-sample testing rather than on the basis of college degrees can be found in my extensive FAQ on the subject, written for Hacker News threads about hiring.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

LAST EDIT: As I expected, people still don't believe this story. I thought it was rather amazing when I heard it. But, with further thought, I've decided that this really is an empirical issue. It may be…

But of course, one prerequisite is absolutely necessary: the ability to approach problems logically. That is what one should look for on top of the domain knowledge.

This is something that many people in the enterprise and in mainstream programming are incredibly in denial about. I would guess that fully half of enterprise software decisions are made on an irrational basis, or at best on stuff that amounts to no more than hearsay.

http://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/01/28/zed-shaws-writeup-of-cusec-2008/

Actually, most people are partially in denial, in that they are unconsciously trained to operate on groupthink. Most companies are not startups, so they have some proven formula for making money. The best strategy in this case is to let that work and to not rock the boat. In this case, being an obedient corporate drone is desirable. In the startup case, one is actively in search of a new formula, so it is most certainly not!

Leaving AI completely aside, it still amazes me that people finds "novel" the idea of removing highly-paid white collar intellectual workers (software developers or otherwise) completely out of the loop.

No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*].

Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access your data" because they resembled some form of English.

The funny thing about the ad below is that stuff like "stop hiring / get rid of humans" would have been seen as highly insensitive in 1950's America, so they touted that as "put them to do something more important".

[*] https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/150_extra_engineers_thumb.jpg

The specs for the laptop you’re interested in are pretty close to the ones for the Acer Nitro 5 (2020 model, Intel i5 10300H processor, NVIDIA HTX 1650 with 4 GB RAM). I wrote about it here:

https://www.globalnerdy.com/2021/07/29/buying-a-used-laptop-for-software-development-on-facebook/

I’ve had it only a few days, but I’m enjoying it. It runs circles around my previous Windows laptop (my work-issued machine is a MacBook Pro), my trusty ThinkPad T430 with 16GB RAM, especially since I used my Amazon points to bump the RAM up to the maximum 32 GB. I’ve been using it to build Android and Flutter mobile apps, learning Unity, Spring Boot/Kotlin web applications, and some Jupyter Notebook work. It also does a lovely job of playing GTA V.

That's not what i get from reading him https://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/07/06/richard-m-stallman-copyright-vs-community-in-the-age-of-computer-networks/

My favorite part:

>Copyright Now

>Now with digital data and computer networks, it much easier for us to copy and manipulate information

> Digital technology has changed the effect of copyright law

> Copyright used to be a power that was:

> wielded by authors

> over publishers

> to yield benefits to the public

> Now it’s a power that is:

> wielded by publishers

> to punish the public

> in the name of the authors

> Now the public wants to copy and share — what would a democratic government do?