Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lead Bullets

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: Lead Bullets

#41

Post by robterrell »

mahyarm wrote: post #28
ctdonath wrote: post #13

Methinks this is the core of why Apple is so successful: they do everything RIGHT. By not looking for shortcuts and silver bullets, they minimize things going wrong.

They do many things that are consumer facing right, but there are somethings that are developer facing that are just wrong. You don't know how much pain and confusion iOS provisioning profiles and signing give to my coworkers and myself initially. It's the majority of the questions I get asked about in relation to iOS.

That's off-topic, but this this is a pet peeve of mine, I'll bite. Have you tried code signing Blackberry apps? Desktop apps, java apps? Shockwave xtras, god forbid? Apple made something really complicated & poorly documented into something that was only moderately difficult and mostly automated, and with Xcode 4 it's possible to know basically nothing about it and develop apps on your own devices, so I'd say Apple did it pretty well.

Re: Lead Bullets

#42

Post by anarchitect »

CJefferson wrote: post #40
InclinedPlane wrote: post #2

Famed chef Gordon Ramsay has a show called "Kitchen Nightmares" where he rescues restaurants that are in trouble. There's a fair share of drama and spectacle in every episode but much of what he does is apply the same fundamental changes to every restaurant. And it's not silver bullets, it's just sound execution of basic, common sense practices. Keep the menu simple, make stuff fresh, keep the kitchen clean, keep ser…

Normally I would never post a youtube link, but this sketch from the UK comedy show Mitchell and Webb sums up my opinion on this perfectly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1NfWIaYed8 Cooking good food well, using simple ingredients, isn't something that anyone can do well.

Thanks, I hadn't seen that one before! "King Lear is just English words put in order!"

Re: Lead Bullets

#45

Post by hga »

dazbradbury wrote: post #25

Comment pulled from techcrunch: Chris Zaharias · Having worked in sales at Netscape for four years (1995-99) I have to very respectfully disagree with Ben. Netscape did not recover from a better, faster, free IIS by building a better web server (called Netscape Enterprise Server, or NES). That helped to a small extent, but much more important were a) competitive advantages in email servers, proxy servers and director…

The market share graph starts at least 3 years after the release of IIS, it was in NT 3.51 SP 3 (and I gather released before that) and NT 4.0, which was released 29 July 1996 according to Wikipedia. I know IIS was solid for intranet use by mid-late 1997 when I started using it.

It also starts near the end of the year "[ Apache ] became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone." (Wikipedia again and Apache was indeed what I was using in 1999.) That suggests both of those established a price of about $0 for a web server.

I'm not sure the two accounts are mutually exclusive, as the further reply by George Scott suggests. A competitve web server, even if it was no longer going to make much money, was I suspect necessary for Netscape to sell or at least get established a lot of the rest of its set of servers (by the time the graph starts I can only remember people talking about their LDAP server). I.e. it's quite possible that if they hadn't expended those lead bullets the silver ones would have been wasted.

Re: Lead Bullets

#46

Post by mahyarm »

robterrell wrote: post #41
mahyarm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do many things that are consumer facing right, but there are somethings that are developer facing that are just wrong. You don't know how much pain and confusion iOS provisioning profiles and signing give to my coworkers and myself initially. It's the majority of the questions I get asked about in relation to iOS.

That's off-topic, but this this is a pet peeve of mine, I'll bite. Have you tried code signing Blackberry apps? Desktop apps, java apps? Shockwave xtras, god forbid? Apple made something really complicated & poorly documented into something that was only moderately difficult and mostly automated, and with Xcode 4 it's possible to know basically nothing about it and develop apps on your own devices, so I'd say Apple d…

Just because it's horrible everywhere and apple is 'less horrible' is still no excuse. It still can be done much better, the developer shouldn't have to do a quarter of the error prone BS with provisioning. Provisioning is very fragile in general and is also a cause of automated build breakages here when it really should never be.

Provisioning is also required 100% of the time to run unsigned apps in iOS. Many of those devices you mentioned let you run unsigned apps after a warning prompt, or at least on a developer device. This can avoid a lot of BS during development.

I've haven't worked with android, but from the lack of complaining by my android working coworkers, I'm guessing that it's much better or non existant on android, apple's main competition.

Re: Lead Bullets

#47

Post by hga »

dillona wrote: post #31
hga wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a DEC Press book covering the history of minicomputers (Gordon Bell was one of the authors as I recall), the most interesting observation was that the companies that survived let alone thrived in the frothy period for them were the ones that did an acceptable job of every essential thing. E.g. make great hardware but don't document it well enough, you fail. DEC's forte at the time was CPUs, most of the rest wasn't…

Do you have any idea about the title of the book?

I'm almost positive that it's somewhere in this (scanned) book: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/CGB%20Fi...

From a page off of Bell's home page: Bell, C. G., C. Mudge, J. McNamara, COMPUTER ENGINEERING, Digital Press 1978

Re: Lead Bullets

#48

Post by corford »

Retric wrote: post #30
kb101 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall working at a growing company that suddenly stopped blowing its forecasts out of the water and sales began to tank (part of an overall market downturn). C-level executives were slaughtered and we were soon treated to a blustery, military-metaphor-laced "hardass" speech to rally the troops, courtesy of the new VP who was keen to let us know that business was war and we were in it to win it, etc. It was lead bu…

His point is simply sometimes the issue is strategy and some times it's execution. If you make a great MMO that people love but it's crashing all the time then fix the bugs and you just might end up making money hand over fist. If you make a solid but older MMO that people enjoy but the subscriber numbers are incontinuous decline then you might want to pivot into free to play etc.

All sound advice but surely everyone knows this already?? I guess I'm missing the insightful part of this lead bullets mantra.
Post reply on HN