281–290 of 408 posts
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Ha! It’s been a while since I’ve seen that type of peeler. Makes sense that it was popular in the 50/60s my grandparents had one. I recently bought a peeler that I don’t like and I’ll try the Jonas one.
Why peel apples? I do cut it in half and take out the core, but that is mostly to be sure there is no Griswald.
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just wondering, what is an "ICE"?
The abbreviation I know is "in-circuit emulator", but wouldn't know if that's what they were referring to
Tim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued.…
How is it that Japanese manufacturing practices made such a deep impact on the Agile software development movement in the West (The New New Product Development Game, Kaizen, Kanban, reduce muda, shu-ha-ri, etc. etc.), yet failed to improve work practices at home?
Similarly, kaizen was all about continual factory process optimization, not optimization of a codebase through iterative refactoring. In fact, the mindset is very much "write the code once, never change it, and keep it running it forever basically without upgrades or patches."
"Reduce muda" (we might say "reduce toil") is laughably out-of-place in Japanese software shops. To give an example, an acquaintance worked as "DevOps" at Rakuten. His job was to release new software versions by opening up 200 SSH terminal windows.
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Language (i.e. character sets) is not a good explanation for differences in software outcomes. It is possible write Japanese entirely in Hiragana charset (~50 chars) which can be represented in 8-bit alongside ASCII chars, which is how early Japanese computers like the PC-8001 worked. The JIS standard for double-byte representation of kanji also characters was also made in the 1970s. So that doesn't explain why Japan…
Language is more than charger sets. Japanese is often read in vertical columns, then right to left. The space of UI’s that feel natural in both languages are just different.
Tim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued.…
Well, maybe they might have been slower to innovate in software, but I think a middle way between their conservatism and the free-wheeling ways of Silicon valley would have served the industry well. Imagine if software engineering was approached in The Toyota Way[1]. As it is now, software engineering us not respected as real engineering because we neglect to apply general engineering principles. We throw away battle…
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This example is complicated by games also being art and how it can be hard to separate both (even when it's just graphics and audio that you keep on a more closed license). See how Western games are still overwhelmingly closed source, despite the now known rewards : like Civilization 4 (2005) opening most (but not all) of its C++ (dll) source code, as well as easy to mod XML & Python scripts resulting in a still aliv…
Why do you think that having people buy a game once and then keep playing it for 18 years is a reward for the developer?
I don't disagree with much of the story, but there are other factors too. A big one is that due to the complexity of the Japanese writing system, PCs never went mainstream: the older generations survived with handwriting, faxes and dedicated word processors, and the newer ones jumped right to mobile phones, meaning the PC hacking generation of the 70s and 80s that kicked off the dot-com boom was much smaller than in…
There is a good reason though that the most common communication mechanism in China is talking rather than typing.
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> For instance did the UK become a Software behemoth ? Scotland did. We all know that the video games industry just exploded in Dundee about 20 years ago, but the whole area has a rich software development industry across a lot of fields. One reason games became such a big thing in Dundee was because that's where the Timex factory where they built the ZX Spectrum was. And because that's where the factory was, everyon…
> because that's where the Timex factory where they built the ZX Spectrum was You could say that, but there weren't any problems getting ZX Spectrums in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh either, and the whole UK was awash with bedroom programmers making piles of games. What I think actually put Dundee on the map was David Jones, attending Dundee Institue of Technology (now know as Abertay University) in 1987, employing hi…
The thing is that while a lot of people throughout the UK, by Christmas '83 literally everyone in Dundee had a ZX Spectrum. Probably half the reason they had difficulty fulfilling orders is that so many "minor faults" ones on the lines ended up getting sold in pubs under the table, that would otherwise have been reworked and packaged for retail.
And I mean, literally *everyone*. If you wrote a game and you gave copies to your mates at school, by the end of the week everyone would be playing it, particularly if it was good but even if it wasn't, because it was *new* and you hadn't played it a million times.
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Well, not exactly sarcasm but a snarky way to say that Ruby was written by a Japanese programmer, so he can't be completely incompetent. Perl is my preference of the three (Perl, Python, Ruby). I agree with 'There Is More Than One Way To Do It', and disagree with 'There Is Only One Way To Do It'. And Perl has the best support for regular expressions. Ruby is OK, but I learned Perl first, so it feels more natural.
> And Perl has the best support for regular expressions. To me this sounds a bit like driving to a supermarket three towns away because it has the best selection of coffee filters... :)