"Computers in the 1980s were really difficult to program. He discovered at NeXT Computer that he could build beautiful software using what are called “objects”—items that, essentially, are pre-programmed in a library. This is how apps are made today, and Steve Jobs was doing this in 1988. As a result, the first ever app store appeared on a NeXT computer."
"Wut" indeed! I was only skimming it anyway, but stopped there. I'm sorry, that paragraph is so effed up, I can't take anything else seriously from this author.
This is too often the problem with stuff about Steve Jobs. People worship him, and credit him with inventing everything. So, even ignoring how thoroughly mangled that quoted section is in every way, now he's the inventor of OOP. Did he also invent a time machine to take OOP back to the 1960s?
The best direct reporting on this comes from Jobs himself in the so-called “lost” interview with Bob Cringely:
Jobs:
I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on, and they showed me, But I was so blinded by the first one that One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
FWIW I don’t think they mean “object oriented programming” like Steve knew anything about ObjC, rather the frameworks and APIs of Next/OpenStep/Cocoa and stuff like WebObjects
Jobs was going around trying to sell this to programmers at wall street banks and etc, so he definitely understood that stuff (beyond the drag-n-drop sense). You can probably find some demos on youtube.
Its basically true that there wasn't anything like the Java class library widely available in 1988.
I came here to comment on this as well, but from a different angle. Not only is the description inaccurate, but I distinctly remember a fellow HN commenter writing here years ago a very different story. IIRC, they claimed to be in Mac OS X's team. They said that, at the time, Jobs explicitly told them to not use Object Oriented Programming. But, since they knew he wouldn't be able to tell anyway, they still used OOP.
I think actually for relatively small n we get cases where mathematics says nope, you can't decide that, the machine goes recursive and so now your decider may be looking at a machine which is itself running deciders and Kurt Gödel says "No".
Thanks for the hint to go looking some more. I found that Johannes Riebel has proven that BB(748) is undecidable. So for even small k there may not be deciders for them.
The suspicion is that this happens maybe as early as BB(15). We just can't prove that whereas we can prove BB(745) is not decidable, and, of course, we've decided BB(5) as we see here.
Well no, as a consumer you need to feel comfortable that you know how to get your money back if there's a problem with your purchase, as a merchant you need similar protections and a stable cost model, and as a bank you need an income model to cover all the costs and risks associated with processing the transaction. Moving the money is the easy part and is not the main set of problems that the card payment schemes have solved.
I've never understood this insurance defense of high payment card fees (percentages instead of flat fees).
If it is a truly valuable insurance for the shoppers, why is it not opt-in?
My anecdotal experience from EU is that no-one even knows chargebacks exists or how it works and if this was turned into a transparent honest insurance, prompted via a question on the payment terminal/online checkout such as "Do you want to pay 1-3% to insure this purchase?" the vast majority of people would click no on the vast majority of purchases because there is already inherent trust involved between the merchant and the shopper.
Now add the chargeback pains that merchants go through for credit card frauds and you have what appears to be a sickly system where both shoppers and merchants lose, with the only winners being visa/mastercard & the acquiring and issuing banks they cooperate with.
If I buy a burger from a restaurant and its bad, i tell all my friends and i don't go back. I don't need insurance.
If I buy a service on steam, i already trust valve fully for those smaller amount sizes, I don't need insurance.
My gut feeling is that >99,9% of purchases made via payment cards are not relevant to insure meaning following the simpler risk model of cash for those would work just fine.
Chargebacks are indeed quite detrimental to merchants as they are the ones paying it. And if you have bad customers(maybe competition is trying to put you out of the business), you might get deep into red quite fast. Usually it is anywhere between 20 and 50 euros, which is crazy when it is just a reverse of the bank transfer which is the tech in the background. Like if you run a small online store and you sell 10€ items where you make a 5€ pre-tax profit, having a 20€ chargeback on such sale can be really dangerous.
There is no difference to the bank transfer(as that is what all of this is just wrapping inside). If you are paying with a debit card, you have the same "protections" as basic bank transfer. And from personal experience, the bank is near useless and you won't be even able to call your card company.
On the other hand, credit cards are something else. Those are essentially short-term loans that are insured. As there are many parties involved that profit from you use of these, there indeed is a lot of protection in this case. But credit cards are very niche part of online card payments and mostly it is a USA thing.
> Moving the money is the easy part and is not the main set of problems that the card payment schemes have solved.
Nailed it. Anyone can move money.
As a consumer, I always opt to pay for credit card where available. The safeties provided to me facilitated by everyone in the network – from issuer to acquirer and everyone in between – is exactly why. I don't want to consider waiting 12 months in line at small claims to get back $200 sent over Interac for services that were never provided by a shoddy business owner.
The cost of those consumer safeties and convenience is incurred by the merchant. This is the cost of business.
When you buy something from Amazon, who protects your purchases, Amazon or the credit card company?
This "insurance" could be offloaded to a neutral third party that isn't controlled by the credit cards. Often, you purchase additional protection insurance on your big ticket items. This could easily be extended to cover whatever credit cards would have been relied upon in the past.
> This "insurance" could be offloaded to a neutral third party that isn't controlled by the credit cards.
I had not considered this. My first thought is how technically and operationally complex it would be for an insurer to underwrite these transactions "on-the-fly" from merchants they don't know, but it is probably a great idea.
I don't have a makefile example, but I do functionally the same thing with shell scripts.
I let GitHub actions do things like the initial environment configuration and the post-run formatting/annotation, but all of the actual work is done by my scripts:
wow, maybe it's just that I have as little greek as gaelic, but Homer's mad flow gave me the same vibes as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sf0htzbMKk&t=34s (composed ~2750 years later, and to be honest, these lads are not exactly under the aegis of Athena Glaukopis — if anyone's, Dionysus Acratophorus)
Yes! Many of the responses here are intellectual, missing something more earthy. In particular, hearing Lombardo reading from his translation of the Iliad [0] stirred me deeply. For sure I'm going to find a print of his version.
"Computers in the 1980s were really difficult to program. He discovered at NeXT Computer that he could build beautiful software using what are called “objects”—items that, essentially, are pre-programmed in a library. This is how apps are made today, and Steve Jobs was doing this in 1988. As a result, the first ever app store appeared on a NeXT computer."