AGPS tells a GPS receiver where satellites are supposed to be at a certain time, to help it initially lock on to their signal. It does not provide a higher-precision location, or one at all in places where GPS cannot penetrate.
It depends on your definition of AGPS really. In the real world, systems like iOS, skyhook, (and probably Android, not sure) do exactly what this article describes already - they use signals like cell phone masts and Wifi SSDs to work out where they are, as a separate and independent step to GPS location (though they may then use that rough location to assist GPS locating). They call this AGPS, but you can call it whatever you want. If you turn off the GPS in your iPhone, or use a wifi only iPod it will still locate you, just with not quite as much accuracy as an unobstructed GPS signal or a location generated from GPS and other signals.
This article is really just uneducated scare-mongering.
Stock markets are for investment, not speculation.
Sub-ms speeds for trades implies algorithms are doing the trading, not humans, as humans obviously can't keep up at that speed - they set the algorithms in motion, but cannot control them except by unrolling deals (which happens a scary amount on our current exchanges after flash crashes etc). So the only people benefiting from this market 'liquidity' are speculators trying to take a share of each transaction by ending up in the middle, or manipulate the market to their advantage (being on the right side of a flash crash in the example you cite). Theres nothing wrong with middlemen when they are tightly regulated, but at this speed of transactions they are providing negative worth to the other market participants, and limits should be set on their behaviour, just as we have limits on insider dealing and other abuses of the market mechanisms which would be vastly profitable for the participants (but not for the companies being traded).
If you accept that markets are for investment in companies, it follows we should limit HFT and other abuses of the market - instead of technical limits I would simply impose a tax on each transaction - that would soon remove those market participants who are only there to skim off tiny percentages on tiny deals performed millions of times per second, while not introducing the distortions and workarounds which would be inevitable with some sort of hard limit to transactions or clever system to limit frequency. It would also let us remove some of the obscene wealth generated by the participants in financial markets and use it to support other parts of our civilisation.
HFT is faster, but it is not better or stronger except in some crude darwinian sense of nature red in tooth and claw - that's not something I agree our markets should try to emulate. HFT and algorithmic trading are potentially very dangerous and abstract the products traded until what is being traded hardly matters, which is entirely the wrong direction for our markets. We need more regulation in place to stop this sort of control of the market by a few major players who play everyone else for suckers, just as we should have had regulations on CDOs, CDSs, and the incredibly corrupt ratings agencies who are at the heart of our financial breakdown. We've had far too little regulation of the financial markets for far too long.
Just like the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica ended so will the Pax Americana also end when the USA stops protecting client/allied states.
How can you talk of 'Pax Americana' when America is currently embroiled in two occupations, and several eternal wars (e.g. war against drugs, war against error) - or are these merely police actions where tens of thousands of civilians happened to die? These are/were serious wars, and there is and has been no Pax Americana (at least not in the last few decades). Those not in the military in the states can perhaps kid themselves that this is some kind of peace, but it's not long lasting and not perceived as peace by the rest of the world. If the last decades of invasions, threatened nuclear armageddon and terror are peace, you can keep it.
Protecting client/allied states (Nato for example) is entirely different from funding terror (via Pakistan ISI, or the Mujahideen for example), funding revolutions (Iran), funding religious states (Israel), setting up secret prisons around the world, invading Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe next Iran. That's just misguided empire building, it's not legitimate defence. Regardless of your opinion of whether these interventions are in the interests of the US, if your government is investing huge amounts of your budget in the military and in military aid, and the lives of your armed forces in foreign intervention, it behooves you to find out exactly what they are doing and why.
Yes I know, the Syria whatever-the-fuck-happens-there could theoretically very slightly affect me through the butterfly effect but really... not worth my immediate interest. Give me the high level overview: Syria dudes are still beating each other; China launched some satellite; USA still has crushing debt and Greece goes down the drain. Have a nice day!
When your politicians go war on false premises, or authorise extra funding for Saudi Arabia/Pakistan/Israel/..., I guarantee events in Syra/Iran/Other countries you consider unimportant will have a major impact on the finances of your country, the way your money is spent, and on the course of your life. The news that is presented to you (particularly when it is in digest form as you seem to prefer) dictates how you think about world events, whether you think that Pakistan is a hotbed of islamists which sponsors terror, or a staunch US ally which receives billions a year and bulwark against communism, or both, whether you think that Iraq is a useful ally against Iran and worth supporting (1980s) or an evil dictatorship (1990s). That in turn dictates who you might support or vote for in US elections, and where your taxes will be spent around the world and on your military.
When the time comes that the US decides to stop managing an empire of satellite states and dependencies abroad, that'll be the time you can stop worrying about anything but local news. I agree that local news is more important, particularly for more trivial items, but international news is incredibly important - if you want to make decisions on international events you should try to be well informed about them - if you don't want to have to bother with that, encourage your government to stop interfering in the rest of the world (a habit not unique to the US, so this applies to citizens of any country really).
Since you have to ask, the words 'sky high' - this sort of hyperbole undermines the message, and marks it as an obvious joke.
This sort of silly threat *might* merit investigation (though frankly I think it is such an obvious joke investigating would be pointless, there are plenty of real crimes to investigate), but on finding someone without the means, motive, or motivation to actually bomb an airport, perhaps the police and CPS should have thought better of wasting public money on a trial and incarceration.
Choose something other than php and you will soon come to realise why everyone hates it so much, and why it is an embarrassing suggestion for 'general purpose utilities'. Seriously, even if you love php, or esp. if you love php, if you want to learn anything about programming, try any other language.
There is no kind way to say this, so I'll just say it - PHP is the worst possible choice for anything other than getting a small web page up in a hurry, and is a million miles from anything to do with 'general purpose utilities', so for your stated purpose it is absolutely tell the wrong choice.
Decide exactly what you want to do first, then decide on the most appropriate language to do it.
Having a problem to solve will help with two things - motivation when learning gets tough, and deciding on a language. There is no one true language which is best for everything. If you want to produce utilities for Linux or mac os, ruby, python, or even bash would be your best bet, though it does depend what for - for processing excel data I'd use csv export and ruby, for scripting adobe programs JavaScript, etc, etc. If you're on windows, perhaps consider their powershell thing and.net.
Also, don't ask slashdot for advice:) nowadays it's entertaining, but unlikely to be useful. Maybe things were different back in the day, but nowadays this site is infra digg.
Microsoft does not make computers, or make them cheaper. That trend was started by hardware manufacturers competing with IBM with clean room implementations of the bios, and continued with netbooks etc. Nice rewrite of history.
First reasonable comment on this topic. Most people comparing java to python sound like they've only written hello world in both and have total lack of understanding of how things work.
Have you written any complex applications in Python? If so, what problems did you run into? If not, why do you feel you are qualified to comment on whether it would work for complex projects?
is an important United States Supreme Court case establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright.
Unfortunately for your argument, languages are far from information alone with a minimum of original creativity. They take a lot of thinking, planning, and creative thought in order to come up with a structure for others to work in. I completely disagree with Oracle's position here, but you can't claim that creating a programming language is like listing facts in a telephone directory, it takes a lot more work and creativity than that and it is not created based on merely observing the world but on copying the good bits of other languages (so Oracle is crazy to even go down this path). It's more like creating a font, a dictionary, or recipes, all of which have *elements* which are copyrightable, but are in this same murky grey area, precisely because they are used by so many other people to create other stuff, which makes it of questionable value to society to lock them up with copyright.
Unfortunately arguments in a courtroom are never about value to society, though you could argue that they should be, as in this sort of common law legal system court decisions (as the one you cite above) *creates and defines the law*.
They need to look at all mistakes made with mobile platforms for other phones though. Remember that iPhone development was originally to be javascript, but the performance (or whatever) wasn;t good enough so they scrapped it in favour of native code.
I think that Apple was visionary here in trying to choose web apps but just could not execute in time, and therefore took the native route as a shortcut (their mistake was using native internally, and then telling developers to use clearly inferior (at the time) web apps, instead of improving web apps enough so that they could use them internally). If they could have pulled it off properly (i.e. if they had known and prepared for the gold-rush that iOS would become, they had no idea), they would be in a much better place right now, and prepared for the inevitable move back to the web as people discover mobile apps are not the centre of the universe or a new paradigm.
Games are a different ball-game completely - those should be completely native and using opengl for the interface too (often they don't rely on the OS for UI stuff), but for the vast majority of apps, all they need is to be able to access native code as required for speed/libraries - on top of that they could be built in any sort of language, and using the web for interfaces would be a great fit for google - they already have some of the best web development people, and could leverage that for a phone UI.
Personally, what I think Google should do/should have done is develop a simple C library (C++ simply is not necessary for this, and if they choose to use it can be hidden behind a C API) which provides hooks for everything the phone does, and use this as a basis for any and all native interfaces they wish to provide, along with as the basis for a webUI which uses html and css for layout and some other language (Would prefer not JS or Java but there are many options) for code. Crucially they would have to port all their apps to this and lead by example, and improve it enough that performance was perfect.
That would give them a path to transition off Java, appeal to devs looking to use code x-platform, a huge market of devs who know web development, and let them respond quickly to changes in the development scene by adding in new top-level languages as they become popular. Instead they are now stuck with Java (which is widely used in corporates, but *not* by developers of consumer apps or on iOS) and in a fight with the owners of their language runtime - that's not going to end well for anyone.
I'm well aware of that thanks, it doesn't mean QT will have a future when Nokia folds, or is subsumed by Microsoft.
Who do you think pays for the vast majority of QT development at present? Maintaining a cross-platform toolkit is very hard and takes constant effort, which is why QT has been so valuable for desktop apps, Nokia has no incentive to do that, and MS has negative incentive to do that, and it's not an exciting problem that would attract lots of open-source developers. Nokia has tried to push QT toward mobile development fast (along with all their other failed efforts like maemo, etc, going in a hundred directions at once), but now they have settled on Windows Phone, QT will be left to drift like Symbian has been, and funding gradually cut. Maybe they'll try to sell it again - that would be the best possible outcome for QT.
Those are the reasons I think QT is a zombie, or will be one soon - feel free to differ with that analysis, but code quality and utility are not the biggest factors in it - this is not a technical judgement of QT (which I have used and found to be adequate), but a political judgement of where the software landscape will be in 5-10 years, and the likelihood of QT being a viable ecosystem which supports the effort put in. It'd be nice if corporate politics didn't come into it, but I'm afraid it does.
Qt is a zombie. Maybe it will survive the death or takeover by MS of Nokia, and the current churn in the codebase which is trying to reposition it for mobile, but I wouldn't like to place bets on it, or bet the future of a healthy platform like android on it. Symbian and meego are never going to go anywhere, as Nokia has made clear, so support for them is totally pointless at this stage. Far more important than a vast catalogue is having a clear and consistent ui on the core apps which people use every day.
If they managed a transition right though, they wouldn't even need to give up the android java apps, they could just let people gradually migrate.
Google would be far better to look at the progress made in mobile uis, the mistakes they've made with android, and try to learn from them to produce something truly new and exciting - if I were them I'd make it web based, but with a nicer language than JavaScript driving interaction, and of course hooks for using c or java libraries. Webos so nearly fot there, and then failed for other reasons, and ios tried to start that way and only changed tack because the tools were not mature enough and they were not eating their own dogfood (if all the native apps had been local webapps on ios, things might have been different). Google have enough momentum and talent to create their own platform and push a lot of developers onto it.
I summary, google needs qt far less than it needs a committed sponsor.
There are a lot of options, and as you say Apple is a good example here - it is possible to take most of your developers with you, with the right combination of threats, cajoling, and incentives, even through multiple huge transitions, as Apple have managed over the last decade.
To be fair, I'm not sure this sort of endless litigation is necessarily caused by patents, it's more a result of the legal system we have, and the perverse incentives for lawyers to keep themselves in work. Jarndyce v Jarndyce is a good place to start for an example of this which doesn't involve patents.
In spite of the sunk cost of Davlik, I think at this point it would be better for Google to simply deprecate Java and tell developers that new development will happen in some other language (like Dart, python, whatever). They could continue to support the Java API indefinitely, but give new apps all the new features and optimisation. Android has had a lot of stick for being a slow, unpolished platform, and this is an opportunity to ditch some of that reputation, at the same time as ditching an unwilling partner (Oracle) who obviously doesn't appreciate what Google have done for Java with Android. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about - constant antagonism with the management of the language standard they are using. If Oracle loses this case they will not take it lying down - expect other moves against Google in the future, hell, even if they win I expect they'd come back for more at some later date. Oracle is obviously in a death spiral and determined to take the rest of the world with it - Apple has also ditched them recently, it seems because of friction with Oracle and new licensing terms, so it's not as if this is going to get better.
Java has caused Google serious issues with performance on a mobile platform anyway - they'd be better off with a language and platform that they control entirely. Unfortunately changing the platform like this would be a huge wrench and would have to be managed very carefully over a period of years, but it can be done.
But I've always done kernel, systems, and general server-side work, not the modern web-stuff.
Perhaps that's why you think it's informative. I'm afraid completely misguided, at least in his mischaracterisation of the languages, I can't comment on the conferences, not having been to many. Ruby may have some superficial similarities to Perl in syntax but it is entirely different in culture, aims, and implementation, it is far closer to Python for example. Javascript is quite an interesting language, if you're not fazed by its unusual object system, of course it has its flaws, but it's by no means worthless. As to NoSQL, I haven't used one of these systems, and some of them cause more problems than they solve, but there's obviously a need for them or people wouldn't keep reinventing them. By the time Google uses something like BigTable, there is obviously some value, in some situations, for dropping relational dbs and going for something simpler. The NoSQL movement has the backing of some very big names.
As to 'ignorance is embraced as a core value of a community' and 'rotten communities', I suspect the grandparent just got carried away with playing to the peanut gallery here on Slashdot - the post is almost entirely free of substance, and what substance there is is wrong, which makes me suspect all the emotional appeals about a rotten community too. I certainly haven't experienced a rotten web community online as described around Ruby - probably he's just been exposed to lots of younger males at these conferences, and been shocked by their mix of ignorance and arrogance - I imagine if the poster met the usual denizens of slashdot face to face he would have the same feeling.
I'm sure there must be some concrete examples of this sort of boorish behaviour at conferences, but it's hardly the norm for Ruby at least.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, staunch US allies who receive billions in funds?
Your naive trust in the congruence of progress and American involvement astounds me.
Another possibility is to use jquery 2 for all other browsers and jquery 1.9 for ie 10 via conditional comments.
Where the "something" in this case are the states of Boolean variables.
Is that the same sort of boolean as the states of Legal/Illegal, or some other rarefied form with which we are not familiar?
That's great, but who remembers the one password to your encrypted database of passwords?
Lisa, I want to buy your rock...
How do you know the spam comes from android devices?
AGPS tells a GPS receiver where satellites are supposed to be at a certain time, to help it initially lock on to their signal. It does not provide a higher-precision location, or one at all in places where GPS cannot penetrate.
It depends on your definition of AGPS really. In the real world, systems like iOS, skyhook, (and probably Android, not sure) do exactly what this article describes already - they use signals like cell phone masts and Wifi SSDs to work out where they are, as a separate and independent step to GPS location (though they may then use that rough location to assist GPS locating). They call this AGPS, but you can call it whatever you want. If you turn off the GPS in your iPhone, or use a wifi only iPod it will still locate you, just with not quite as much accuracy as an unobstructed GPS signal or a location generated from GPS and other signals.
This article is really just uneducated scare-mongering.
Stock markets are for investment, not speculation.
Sub-ms speeds for trades implies algorithms are doing the trading, not humans, as humans obviously can't keep up at that speed - they set the algorithms in motion, but cannot control them except by unrolling deals (which happens a scary amount on our current exchanges after flash crashes etc). So the only people benefiting from this market 'liquidity' are speculators trying to take a share of each transaction by ending up in the middle, or manipulate the market to their advantage (being on the right side of a flash crash in the example you cite). Theres nothing wrong with middlemen when they are tightly regulated, but at this speed of transactions they are providing negative worth to the other market participants, and limits should be set on their behaviour, just as we have limits on insider dealing and other abuses of the market mechanisms which would be vastly profitable for the participants (but not for the companies being traded).
If you accept that markets are for investment in companies, it follows we should limit HFT and other abuses of the market - instead of technical limits I would simply impose a tax on each transaction - that would soon remove those market participants who are only there to skim off tiny percentages on tiny deals performed millions of times per second, while not introducing the distortions and workarounds which would be inevitable with some sort of hard limit to transactions or clever system to limit frequency. It would also let us remove some of the obscene wealth generated by the participants in financial markets and use it to support other parts of our civilisation.
HFT is faster, but it is not better or stronger except in some crude darwinian sense of nature red in tooth and claw - that's not something I agree our markets should try to emulate. HFT and algorithmic trading are potentially very dangerous and abstract the products traded until what is being traded hardly matters, which is entirely the wrong direction for our markets. We need more regulation in place to stop this sort of control of the market by a few major players who play everyone else for suckers, just as we should have had regulations on CDOs, CDSs, and the incredibly corrupt ratings agencies who are at the heart of our financial breakdown. We've had far too little regulation of the financial markets for far too long.
Just like the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica ended so will the Pax Americana also end when the USA stops protecting client/allied states.
How can you talk of 'Pax Americana' when America is currently embroiled in two occupations, and several eternal wars (e.g. war against drugs, war against error) - or are these merely police actions where tens of thousands of civilians happened to die? These are/were serious wars, and there is and has been no Pax Americana (at least not in the last few decades). Those not in the military in the states can perhaps kid themselves that this is some kind of peace, but it's not long lasting and not perceived as peace by the rest of the world. If the last decades of invasions, threatened nuclear armageddon and terror are peace, you can keep it.
Protecting client/allied states (Nato for example) is entirely different from funding terror (via Pakistan ISI, or the Mujahideen for example), funding revolutions (Iran), funding religious states (Israel), setting up secret prisons around the world, invading Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe next Iran. That's just misguided empire building, it's not legitimate defence. Regardless of your opinion of whether these interventions are in the interests of the US, if your government is investing huge amounts of your budget in the military and in military aid, and the lives of your armed forces in foreign intervention, it behooves you to find out exactly what they are doing and why.
Yes I know, the Syria whatever-the-fuck-happens-there could theoretically very slightly affect me through the butterfly effect but really... not worth my immediate interest. Give me the high level overview: Syria dudes are still beating each other; China launched some satellite; USA still has crushing debt and Greece goes down the drain. Have a nice day!
When your politicians go war on false premises, or authorise extra funding for Saudi Arabia/Pakistan/Israel/..., I guarantee events in Syra/Iran/Other countries you consider unimportant will have a major impact on the finances of your country, the way your money is spent, and on the course of your life. The news that is presented to you (particularly when it is in digest form as you seem to prefer) dictates how you think about world events, whether you think that Pakistan is a hotbed of islamists which sponsors terror, or a staunch US ally which receives billions a year and bulwark against communism, or both, whether you think that Iraq is a useful ally against Iran and worth supporting (1980s) or an evil dictatorship (1990s). That in turn dictates who you might support or vote for in US elections, and where your taxes will be spent around the world and on your military.
When the time comes that the US decides to stop managing an empire of satellite states and dependencies abroad, that'll be the time you can stop worrying about anything but local news. I agree that local news is more important, particularly for more trivial items, but international news is incredibly important - if you want to make decisions on international events you should try to be well informed about them - if you don't want to have to bother with that, encourage your government to stop interfering in the rest of the world (a habit not unique to the US, so this applies to citizens of any country really).
Since you have to ask, the words 'sky high' - this sort of hyperbole undermines the message, and marks it as an obvious joke.
This sort of silly threat *might* merit investigation (though frankly I think it is such an obvious joke investigating would be pointless, there are plenty of real crimes to investigate), but on finding someone without the means, motive, or motivation to actually bomb an airport, perhaps the police and CPS should have thought better of wasting public money on a trial and incarceration.
There is another huge earthquake well overdue on the three fault line which underlie Tokyo, not so far from Fukushima.
Of course, all the *real* chatbots are too busy with their day job - posting spam to twitter and pumping out mass emails.
Choose something other than php and you will soon come to realise why everyone hates it so much, and why it is an embarrassing suggestion for 'general purpose utilities'. Seriously, even if you love php, or esp. if you love php, if you want to learn anything about programming, try any other language.
There is no kind way to say this, so I'll just say it - PHP is the worst possible choice for anything other than getting a small web page up in a hurry, and is a million miles from anything to do with 'general purpose utilities', so for your stated purpose it is absolutely tell the wrong choice.
Decide exactly what you want to do first, then decide on the most appropriate language to do it.
Having a problem to solve will help with two things - motivation when learning gets tough, and deciding on a language. There is no one true language which is best for everything. If you want to produce utilities for Linux or mac os, ruby, python, or even bash would be your best bet, though it does depend what for - for processing excel data I'd use csv export and ruby, for scripting adobe programs JavaScript, etc, etc. If you're on windows, perhaps consider their powershell thing and .net.
Also, don't ask slashdot for advice :) nowadays it's entertaining, but unlikely to be useful. Maybe things were different back in the day, but nowadays this site is infra digg.
Microsoft does not make computers, or make them cheaper. That trend was started by hardware manufacturers competing with IBM with clean room implementations of the bios, and continued with netbooks etc. Nice rewrite of history.
First reasonable comment on this topic. Most people comparing java to python sound like they've only written hello world in both and have total lack of understanding of how things work.
Have you written any complex applications in Python? If so, what problems did you run into? If not, why do you feel you are qualified to comment on whether it would work for complex projects?
is an important United States Supreme Court case establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright.
Unfortunately for your argument, languages are far from information alone with a minimum of original creativity. They take a lot of thinking, planning, and creative thought in order to come up with a structure for others to work in. I completely disagree with Oracle's position here, but you can't claim that creating a programming language is like listing facts in a telephone directory, it takes a lot more work and creativity than that and it is not created based on merely observing the world but on copying the good bits of other languages (so Oracle is crazy to even go down this path). It's more like creating a font, a dictionary, or recipes, all of which have *elements* which are copyrightable, but are in this same murky grey area, precisely because they are used by so many other people to create other stuff, which makes it of questionable value to society to lock them up with copyright.
Unfortunately arguments in a courtroom are never about value to society, though you could argue that they should be, as in this sort of common law legal system court decisions (as the one you cite above) *creates and defines the law*.
They need to look at all mistakes made with mobile platforms for other phones though. Remember that iPhone development was originally to be javascript, but the performance (or whatever) wasn;t good enough so they scrapped it in favour of native code.
I think that Apple was visionary here in trying to choose web apps but just could not execute in time, and therefore took the native route as a shortcut (their mistake was using native internally, and then telling developers to use clearly inferior (at the time) web apps, instead of improving web apps enough so that they could use them internally). If they could have pulled it off properly (i.e. if they had known and prepared for the gold-rush that iOS would become, they had no idea), they would be in a much better place right now, and prepared for the inevitable move back to the web as people discover mobile apps are not the centre of the universe or a new paradigm.
Games are a different ball-game completely - those should be completely native and using opengl for the interface too (often they don't rely on the OS for UI stuff), but for the vast majority of apps, all they need is to be able to access native code as required for speed/libraries - on top of that they could be built in any sort of language, and using the web for interfaces would be a great fit for google - they already have some of the best web development people, and could leverage that for a phone UI.
Personally, what I think Google should do/should have done is develop a simple C library (C++ simply is not necessary for this, and if they choose to use it can be hidden behind a C API) which provides hooks for everything the phone does, and use this as a basis for any and all native interfaces they wish to provide, along with as the basis for a webUI which uses html and css for layout and some other language (Would prefer not JS or Java but there are many options) for code. Crucially they would have to port all their apps to this and lead by example, and improve it enough that performance was perfect.
That would give them a path to transition off Java, appeal to devs looking to use code x-platform, a huge market of devs who know web development, and let them respond quickly to changes in the development scene by adding in new top-level languages as they become popular. Instead they are now stuck with Java (which is widely used in corporates, but *not* by developers of consumer apps or on iOS) and in a fight with the owners of their language runtime - that's not going to end well for anyone.
I'm well aware of that thanks, it doesn't mean QT will have a future when Nokia folds, or is subsumed by Microsoft.
Who do you think pays for the vast majority of QT development at present? Maintaining a cross-platform toolkit is very hard and takes constant effort, which is why QT has been so valuable for desktop apps, Nokia has no incentive to do that, and MS has negative incentive to do that, and it's not an exciting problem that would attract lots of open-source developers. Nokia has tried to push QT toward mobile development fast (along with all their other failed efforts like maemo, etc, going in a hundred directions at once), but now they have settled on Windows Phone, QT will be left to drift like Symbian has been, and funding gradually cut. Maybe they'll try to sell it again - that would be the best possible outcome for QT.
Those are the reasons I think QT is a zombie, or will be one soon - feel free to differ with that analysis, but code quality and utility are not the biggest factors in it - this is not a technical judgement of QT (which I have used and found to be adequate), but a political judgement of where the software landscape will be in 5-10 years, and the likelihood of QT being a viable ecosystem which supports the effort put in. It'd be nice if corporate politics didn't come into it, but I'm afraid it does.
Qt is a zombie. Maybe it will survive the death or takeover by MS of Nokia, and the current churn in the codebase which is trying to reposition it for mobile, but I wouldn't like to place bets on it, or bet the future of a healthy platform like android on it. Symbian and meego are never going to go anywhere, as Nokia has made clear, so support for them is totally pointless at this stage. Far more important than a vast catalogue is having a clear and consistent ui on the core apps which people use every day.
If they managed a transition right though, they wouldn't even need to give up the android java apps, they could just let people gradually migrate.
Google would be far better to look at the progress made in mobile uis, the mistakes they've made with android, and try to learn from them to produce something truly new and exciting - if I were them I'd make it web based, but with a nicer language than JavaScript driving interaction, and of course hooks for using c or java libraries. Webos so nearly fot there, and then failed for other reasons, and ios tried to start that way and only changed tack because the tools were not mature enough and they were not eating their own dogfood (if all the native apps had been local webapps on ios, things might have been different). Google have enough momentum and talent to create their own platform and push a lot of developers onto it.
I summary, google needs qt far less than it needs a committed sponsor.
Haven't really looked at Go, thanks for the tip.
There are a lot of options, and as you say Apple is a good example here - it is possible to take most of your developers with you, with the right combination of threats, cajoling, and incentives, even through multiple huge transitions, as Apple have managed over the last decade.
To be fair, I'm not sure this sort of endless litigation is necessarily caused by patents, it's more a result of the legal system we have, and the perverse incentives for lawyers to keep themselves in work. Jarndyce v Jarndyce is a good place to start for an example of this which doesn't involve patents.
In spite of the sunk cost of Davlik, I think at this point it would be better for Google to simply deprecate Java and tell developers that new development will happen in some other language (like Dart, python, whatever). They could continue to support the Java API indefinitely, but give new apps all the new features and optimisation. Android has had a lot of stick for being a slow, unpolished platform, and this is an opportunity to ditch some of that reputation, at the same time as ditching an unwilling partner (Oracle) who obviously doesn't appreciate what Google have done for Java with Android. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about - constant antagonism with the management of the language standard they are using. If Oracle loses this case they will not take it lying down - expect other moves against Google in the future, hell, even if they win I expect they'd come back for more at some later date. Oracle is obviously in a death spiral and determined to take the rest of the world with it - Apple has also ditched them recently, it seems because of friction with Oracle and new licensing terms, so it's not as if this is going to get better.
Java has caused Google serious issues with performance on a mobile platform anyway - they'd be better off with a language and platform that they control entirely. Unfortunately changing the platform like this would be a huge wrench and would have to be managed very carefully over a period of years, but it can be done.
But I've always done kernel, systems, and general server-side work, not the modern web-stuff.
Perhaps that's why you think it's informative. I'm afraid completely misguided, at least in his mischaracterisation of the languages, I can't comment on the conferences, not having been to many. Ruby may have some superficial similarities to Perl in syntax but it is entirely different in culture, aims, and implementation, it is far closer to Python for example. Javascript is quite an interesting language, if you're not fazed by its unusual object system, of course it has its flaws, but it's by no means worthless. As to NoSQL, I haven't used one of these systems, and some of them cause more problems than they solve, but there's obviously a need for them or people wouldn't keep reinventing them. By the time Google uses something like BigTable, there is obviously some value, in some situations, for dropping relational dbs and going for something simpler. The NoSQL movement has the backing of some very big names.
As to 'ignorance is embraced as a core value of a community' and 'rotten communities', I suspect the grandparent just got carried away with playing to the peanut gallery here on Slashdot - the post is almost entirely free of substance, and what substance there is is wrong, which makes me suspect all the emotional appeals about a rotten community too. I certainly haven't experienced a rotten web community online as described around Ruby - probably he's just been exposed to lots of younger males at these conferences, and been shocked by their mix of ignorance and arrogance - I imagine if the poster met the usual denizens of slashdot face to face he would have the same feeling.
I'm sure there must be some concrete examples of this sort of boorish behaviour at conferences, but it's hardly the norm for Ruby at least.