I've had a number of Jolla devices. My wife has a Jolla phone. If I were on the market today for a new phone, I'd be running Sailfish. The guys at Jolla are building genuine independence and, by being relatively obscure, I think manage to keep things secure yet flexible. Much of my work is in Linux admin and to be able to do that work, natively, straight off my phone is a joy.
Word of warning: it's like Linux on the desktop - it works really well but you need to engage your brain. There is no easy way of syncing your music on your phone to some music library on some cloud service but hey, if you want to, you can find a way. Don't use a Jolla if you want a brain-dead experience or if you suffer regularly from hang-overs.
Word of warning 2: When you meet someone else running Sailfish in the wild the amount of excitement generated probably needs a health warning - for you and those around you. If you have a heart problem, don't go looking for other Jolla fans outside a Jolla event.
I've been running SailfishOS on a Jolla for several years. Never had a problem. Frequently updated with good, reliable updates. I have full root access to the device. I can add my own scripts and apps. Many packages have been ported. Yup, there are a few missing pieces (like whatsapp but which/.er needs needs them when you can run bash?). Soon to be running on Sony hardware. I think that the Russians and the Chinese think that there is a need for a genuine free OS (as in free from the US snooping) so I hope it won't die anytime soon. Sad that the Jolla tablet didn't work out - that is a truly lovely piece of hardware to use.
I run 4 miles a day across London as part of my commute and well over half of this is in the gutters because there are too many people walking (shambling whilst yakking on their iPhones?) on the footpaths. There is a painted speed bump just 1/4 of a mile from my final destination (just by Borough Market). It never slows me down. Quite the opposite - I always speeds me up as I race to clear it before some muppet slams on their breaks to avoid it and skids their car into me.
Never mind - even if I were Mo Farrar I'd be struggling to get to 20 miles an hour...
As a mentor at a London based start-up school in the last few years I have seen a rapid shift to the brightest and most innovative new wannabie entrepreneurs coming to London from other EU memberstates rather than from the UK - at least attending our school. They have good ideas and plenty of determination and significantly out do most of the home grown people.
You should be anyways, but not for the reasons that you might think.
I always include a link in comments to the source of the borrowed code (or approach), because the relevant discussion will illuminate the how and why far better than a large block comment.
I even do so in one off shell scripts (of which many owe some level of inspiration to SO). It is all too easy not to be able to remember the exact query you made on SO and not be able to come back to the discussion even a few hours later.
I'm a UK employer of developers based in central London and I let people work from home. Almost all do so every now and then (we allow 15 days a year automatically and always add more if asked). Some work from home on a regular or semi-regular basis 1 or 2 days a week. I have had one person move to Hong Kong for 4 years and one move to Mexico City for 18 months. Both are now back in the UK and both are working as hard as ever and delivering great work.
The problem is less about working from home, more about finding the right people with the right skills. It's not just development skills (I'm looking for Progress and Python coders currently) but it's also the ability to communicate remotely, to pick up the nuances of meetings remotely and to have the self-motivation. A lot of the work is pretty boring (we're contract developers rather than a trendy web shop or start-up) and so it is easy to not communicate and not pick up the vibe. Don't expect to just not show up at the office one day and for everything to be fine. Some of our team work from home for a day and we just don't hear from them or even know that they exist. Don't let yourself be one of them! Be prepared to put in the days in the office when you start - otherwise people just won't know who you are.
Rubbish. The English language belongs to the people of England. There is proper English and that is the English that is spoken by the English. Not all British people speak English. Not all English people speak English (listen to the Cornish or a passing Geordie). Americans certainly don't speak English. Neither do Australians. But the difference between English and French is that we English aren't so possessive and uppity about about our language. Besides, we defeated them in 1815 just like we put the Spaniards in their place in 1588. English is continually developing because we've been accepting good, hard working and ambitious people from all over Europe for millennia and people from our former colonies for a hundred years or so and they all bring interesting variations. We made room for them by shipping all the misfits to other places thereby spreading the beauty of our ways. We don't mind you (and everyone else) messing with our language and not being able to spell "programme", "catalogue" or even "colour" because at least you're nearly speaking the same language as us and so we don't have to bother learning another. Instead we can spend our time being the best country in the world by teaching our children to measure in metres (SI) whilst having yards (BS) on our road signs!
We already have one of these. The speaker is good. It's the mic that's rubbish. If you hold it too close the sound is mashed. If you don't then no-one can hear you because of the room...
Get one, mmaybe two real wireless microphones from Shure or someone like that -- think "audio equipment catalog", not "computer equipment catalog". Get the cables to hook the base station up to standard microphone input. Pass the mic around to whoever is talking; it doubles as the "currently speaking" token (and you only have one person at a time talking at standup, right?). Make sure you have lots of spare batteries (presumably rechargeable) in a convenient location.
Passing around a real mic is exactly what I am hoping to do. I was asking/. for recommendations for such a mic! Looks like I've got to check out Shure and Blue Microphone's offerings. Many thanks for your comments!
It is neither a swimming pool (yup, I had to look up "natatorium" and it's an indoor swimming pool) nor is it a closet. It's a room 8m by 4m with 4m ceiling in the middle of a grade 1 listed former royal palace in the middle of London. The people - 6 to 10 - are standing around the end of the table. We have tried a polycom phone through our Asterisk based VOIP phone system but that requires people to sit down and it has even worse echo. I can't fix the room because I need special permission to even drill a hole in the wall (that's what being listed does for you). I can either move out to a new location (seems drastic) or find a solution. There have been some good recommendations for mics to look at (Shure and Blue Microphones) and I've already found one dealer who is a stockist for both so I'll go and take a look and will report back.
As the boss of a company playing in the UK enterprise Linux space I have two machines on my desk. One a MacBookPro and the other a Lenovo running Elementary Luna. I try to run open source software in both - Firefox, Thunderbird, Terminal, Emacs, Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus are my regular tools (did I mention Terminal - that's about 50% of my day?). As OS X develops I reject more and more of what it stands for. I can't stand the App Store and I refuse to install App Store only products. I hate being pandered and molly-coddled. If I want to do something then I want to be able to do it. The only reason I'm writing this on OS X is that the hardware is just better (come on, how hard is it to make a decent keyboard, trackpad and display?). Match Elementary with decent hardware and I'd relegate the Mac (after 30 years...) to legacy only use. Both OSes are equally good at managing a business, managing a stack of Linux servers and writing software.
PrinceXML is reliable, simple and produces the most beautiful PDFs ever. We've used it to replace InDesign as a tool for high end magazine page generation and have analysed the output of both - PrinceXML is significantly cleaner. However, it does help if you combine it with an image (re)sizing tool otherwise you end up with huge bloat with oversized images embedded in your PDF.
Visual representation of source code does not and will not work effectively. Equally, visual representation of the written word will not work effectively. Where images and text go together, either the text is used to explain the image or the image is just an illustration to go with the text, not a real representation.
This all changes when the code is visual, when the programmer programmes visually and there is no text involved other than for labels, names and attributes. This was what Phil Cox and colleagues realised when they produced Prograph, a visual, object orientated data flow language. Prograph was directly compiled into an executable - it was no pseudo coding system that merely generated C or Java, yet it could run interpreted (making it a dream to debug). In comparisons, clean Prograph code could be produced in about 20% of the time taken to produce the equivalent in C++ but ran only 5% slower. Isn't that what we are always looking for?
Sadly, the commercial exploitation of Prograph was not as successful (isn't it ever thus?) but the concept still lives on as Marten. http://www.andescotia.com/
Actually there is lots of evidence that some homeopathy does actually work. Much of it is disguised as "normal" medicine and I bet you use it without knowing.
Interestingly there is equal evidence that idiots in charge really don't work very well. The number of British MPs with any sort of scientific or engineering background is paltry at best (check out the excellent Mark Henderson's "The Geek Manifesto" for more). Having said that, Boris was pretty damn hot at physics and maths as a teenager and should have gone into science so perhaps it doesn't help anyway.
I've employed one psychology grad in an IT role and another in a development role. Nothing wrong with a psychology degree (providing you are naturally bright, hardworking and keen). I'm always interested in hearing from people with different backgrounds - those with fine & applied art degrees can be a good as a CS grad. Sorry, don't do any over-seas recruitment
I'm not worried about recruiting people who may have experience working in the gambling industry - in fact that would probably be a good thing. I'm more worried that you are thinking of leaving the UK. We find it hard to recruit really good juniors in the UK (small firm, not well known but with some great work and based smack in the centre of London) so why do you want to leave? You must be better than most - you already read/.
Computers are also ruining people's ability to draw. First of all 2D CAD removed any manual drafting skills and now rather than reaching for paper and pencil for a quick sketch people waste hours on some 3D modeller. Even diagramming is becoming the domain of the computer. Is it really quicker to do that quick flow chart on a computer than to doodle it out by hand? Is it really so much better? I still believe that all engineers and technicians should be taught the basis of sketching.
We searched for ages for a tool to produce high quality print output from HTML for exactly the same reasons before stumbling on Prince (http://www.princexml.com) and haven't regretted adopting it. We use it from wiki pages, for technical and sales documents, for theses. It is CSS3 aware but the underlieing documents still work in most browsers.
When our business doubled in size we switched to VirtualBox from Parallels 3. Not only is it quicker but it is more stable and its support of different network interfaces and USB devises is clearly superior. We run Eclipse, Apache and all sorts of other development tools on it to do special Windows only development. We also use it as a main support tool. Also don't overlook the fact that you can have multiple 32bit VMs running at the same time - something that Parallels can't do.
MacTech dropped a clanger by not including VirtualBox!
When my 18 month daughter waned to press the keys on my laptop as I worked I pulled out an eMate and set it up for her. Hours of fun drawing and scribbling ensued and now, some 4 years later, she's up to writing letters and email and the like. Sadly the eMate isn't that good at visiting CBBC or CeeBeeBies because there's no colour and no flash but its still working brilliantly.
We've been looking at OpenMoko for a couple of weeks (we've got two) as a commercial prospect (other people pay us to develop free software) but haven't seen the light yet. Its got tons of potential but there is a huge gap between what the OpenMoko community thinks is viable and what the mainstream users will accept. Still, its an open market and it really is truly open source (right down to chip level) and not clouded by Apple, Microsoft or Google.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had a number of Jolla devices. My wife has a Jolla phone. If I were on the market today for a new phone, I'd be running Sailfish. The guys at Jolla are building genuine independence and, by being relatively obscure, I think manage to keep things secure yet flexible. Much of my work is in Linux admin and to be able to do that work, natively, straight off my phone is a joy.
Word of warning: it's like Linux on the desktop - it works really well but you need to engage your brain. There is no easy way of syncing your music on your phone to some music library on some cloud service but hey, if you want to, you can find a way. Don't use a Jolla if you want a brain-dead experience or if you suffer regularly from hang-overs.
Word of warning 2: When you meet someone else running Sailfish in the wild the amount of excitement generated probably needs a health warning - for you and those around you. If you have a heart problem, don't go looking for other Jolla fans outside a Jolla event.
I wish someone would turn Neuromancer into a film, it would be far better than a lot of the garbage we get at the cinema these days.
Better still to turn it into a radio show. As every knows, the pictures are better on the radio.
Want evidence? Hitchhiker's Guide.
I've been running SailfishOS on a Jolla for several years. Never had a problem. Frequently updated with good, reliable updates. I have full root access to the device. I can add my own scripts and apps. Many packages have been ported. Yup, there are a few missing pieces (like whatsapp but which /.er needs needs them when you can run bash?). Soon to be running on Sony hardware. I think that the Russians and the Chinese think that there is a need for a genuine free OS (as in free from the US snooping) so I hope it won't die anytime soon. Sad that the Jolla tablet didn't work out - that is a truly lovely piece of hardware to use.
https://jolla.com/
I run 4 miles a day across London as part of my commute and well over half of this is in the gutters because there are too many people walking (shambling whilst yakking on their iPhones?) on the footpaths. There is a painted speed bump just 1/4 of a mile from my final destination (just by Borough Market). It never slows me down. Quite the opposite - I always speeds me up as I race to clear it before some muppet slams on their breaks to avoid it and skids their car into me.
Never mind - even if I were Mo Farrar I'd be struggling to get to 20 miles an hour...
As a mentor at a London based start-up school in the last few years I have seen a rapid shift to the brightest and most innovative new wannabie entrepreneurs coming to London from other EU memberstates rather than from the UK - at least attending our school. They have good ideas and plenty of determination and significantly out do most of the home grown people.
You should be anyways, but not for the reasons that you might think.
I always include a link in comments to the source of the borrowed code (or approach), because the relevant discussion will illuminate the how and why far better than a large block comment.
I even do so in one off shell scripts (of which many owe some level of inspiration to SO). It is all too easy not to be able to remember the exact query you made on SO and not be able to come back to the discussion even a few hours later.
I'm a UK employer of developers based in central London and I let people work from home. Almost all do so every now and then (we allow 15 days a year automatically and always add more if asked). Some work from home on a regular or semi-regular basis 1 or 2 days a week. I have had one person move to Hong Kong for 4 years and one move to Mexico City for 18 months. Both are now back in the UK and both are working as hard as ever and delivering great work.
The problem is less about working from home, more about finding the right people with the right skills. It's not just development skills (I'm looking for Progress and Python coders currently) but it's also the ability to communicate remotely, to pick up the nuances of meetings remotely and to have the self-motivation. A lot of the work is pretty boring (we're contract developers rather than a trendy web shop or start-up) and so it is easy to not communicate and not pick up the vibe. Don't expect to just not show up at the office one day and for everything to be fine. Some of our team work from home for a day and we just don't hear from them or even know that they exist. Don't let yourself be one of them! Be prepared to put in the days in the office when you start - otherwise people just won't know who you are.
Rubbish. The English language belongs to the people of England. There is proper English and that is the English that is spoken by the English. Not all British people speak English. Not all English people speak English (listen to the Cornish or a passing Geordie). Americans certainly don't speak English. Neither do Australians. But the difference between English and French is that we English aren't so possessive and uppity about about our language. Besides, we defeated them in 1815 just like we put the Spaniards in their place in 1588. English is continually developing because we've been accepting good, hard working and ambitious people from all over Europe for millennia and people from our former colonies for a hundred years or so and they all bring interesting variations. We made room for them by shipping all the misfits to other places thereby spreading the beauty of our ways. We don't mind you (and everyone else) messing with our language and not being able to spell "programme", "catalogue" or even "colour" because at least you're nearly speaking the same language as us and so we don't have to bother learning another. Instead we can spend our time being the best country in the world by teaching our children to measure in metres (SI) whilst having yards (BS) on our road signs!
Works like a charm in somewhat noisy environments too.
http://www.jabra.com/headsets-...
We already have one of these. The speaker is good. It's the mic that's rubbish. If you hold it too close the sound is mashed. If you don't then no-one can hear you because of the room...
Thanks for the suggestion anyway.
Get one, mmaybe two real wireless microphones from Shure or someone like that -- think "audio equipment catalog", not "computer equipment catalog". Get the cables to hook the base station up to standard microphone input. Pass the mic around to whoever is talking; it doubles as the "currently speaking" token (and you only have one person at a time talking at standup, right?). Make sure you have lots of spare batteries (presumably rechargeable) in a convenient location.
Passing around a real mic is exactly what I am hoping to do. I was asking /. for recommendations for such a mic! Looks like I've got to check out Shure and Blue Microphone's offerings. Many thanks for your comments!
It is neither a swimming pool (yup, I had to look up "natatorium" and it's an indoor swimming pool) nor is it a closet. It's a room 8m by 4m with 4m ceiling in the middle of a grade 1 listed former royal palace in the middle of London. The people - 6 to 10 - are standing around the end of the table. We have tried a polycom phone through our Asterisk based VOIP phone system but that requires people to sit down and it has even worse echo. I can't fix the room because I need special permission to even drill a hole in the wall (that's what being listed does for you). I can either move out to a new location (seems drastic) or find a solution. There have been some good recommendations for mics to look at (Shure and Blue Microphones) and I've already found one dealer who is a stockist for both so I'll go and take a look and will report back.
Stefantalpalaru writes:
That's a different project. This one is written in C++ and it uses Qt for the GUI
Which is why John is doing work for Jolla.
Am looking forward to Richochet appearing on my favourite, very open and secure, full featured smart phone.
As the boss of a company playing in the UK enterprise Linux space I have two machines on my desk. One a MacBookPro and the other a Lenovo running Elementary Luna. I try to run open source software in both - Firefox, Thunderbird, Terminal, Emacs, Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus are my regular tools (did I mention Terminal - that's about 50% of my day?). As OS X develops I reject more and more of what it stands for. I can't stand the App Store and I refuse to install App Store only products. I hate being pandered and molly-coddled. If I want to do something then I want to be able to do it. The only reason I'm writing this on OS X is that the hardware is just better (come on, how hard is it to make a decent keyboard, trackpad and display?). Match Elementary with decent hardware and I'd relegate the Mac (after 30 years...) to legacy only use. Both OSes are equally good at managing a business, managing a stack of Linux servers and writing software.
PrinceXML is reliable, simple and produces the most beautiful PDFs ever. We've used it to replace InDesign as a tool for high end magazine page generation and have analysed the output of both - PrinceXML is significantly cleaner. However, it does help if you combine it with an image (re)sizing tool otherwise you end up with huge bloat with oversized images embedded in your PDF.
Visual representation of source code does not and will not work effectively. Equally, visual representation of the written word will not work effectively. Where images and text go together, either the text is used to explain the image or the image is just an illustration to go with the text, not a real representation.
This all changes when the code is visual, when the programmer programmes visually and there is no text involved other than for labels, names and attributes. This was what Phil Cox and colleagues realised when they produced Prograph, a visual, object orientated data flow language. Prograph was directly compiled into an executable - it was no pseudo coding system that merely generated C or Java, yet it could run interpreted (making it a dream to debug). In comparisons, clean Prograph code could be produced in about 20% of the time taken to produce the equivalent in C++ but ran only 5% slower. Isn't that what we are always looking for?
Sadly, the commercial exploitation of Prograph was not as successful (isn't it ever thus?) but the concept still lives on as Marten. http://www.andescotia.com/
Thank you Jack.
Actually there is lots of evidence that some homeopathy does actually work. Much of it is disguised as "normal" medicine and I bet you use it without knowing.
Interestingly there is equal evidence that idiots in charge really don't work very well. The number of British MPs with any sort of scientific or engineering background is paltry at best (check out the excellent Mark Henderson's "The Geek Manifesto" for more). Having said that, Boris was pretty damn hot at physics and maths as a teenager and should have gone into science so perhaps it doesn't help anyway.
I've employed one psychology grad in an IT role and another in a development role. Nothing wrong with a psychology degree (providing you are naturally bright, hardworking and keen). I'm always interested in hearing from people with different backgrounds - those with fine & applied art degrees can be a good as a CS grad. Sorry, don't do any over-seas recruitment
Can Boris please have an ASBO as well?
Might as well give on to Ken at the same time (just in case).
+1
I'm not worried about recruiting people who may have experience working in the gambling industry - in fact that would probably be a good thing. I'm more worried that you are thinking of leaving the UK. We find it hard to recruit really good juniors in the UK (small firm, not well known but with some great work and based smack in the centre of London) so why do you want to leave? You must be better than most - you already read /.
Computers are also ruining people's ability to draw. First of all 2D CAD removed any manual drafting skills and now rather than reaching for paper and pencil for a quick sketch people waste hours on some 3D modeller. Even diagramming is becoming the domain of the computer. Is it really quicker to do that quick flow chart on a computer than to doodle it out by hand? Is it really so much better? I still believe that all engineers and technicians should be taught the basis of sketching.
We searched for ages for a tool to produce high quality print output from HTML for exactly the same reasons before stumbling on Prince (http://www.princexml.com) and haven't regretted adopting it. We use it from wiki pages, for technical and sales documents, for theses. It is CSS3 aware but the underlieing documents still work in most browsers.
When our business doubled in size we switched to VirtualBox from Parallels 3. Not only is it quicker but it is more stable and its support of different network interfaces and USB devises is clearly superior. We run Eclipse, Apache and all sorts of other development tools on it to do special Windows only development. We also use it as a main support tool. Also don't overlook the fact that you can have multiple 32bit VMs running at the same time - something that Parallels can't do.
MacTech dropped a clanger by not including VirtualBox!
When my 18 month daughter waned to press the keys on my laptop as I worked I pulled out an eMate and set it up for her. Hours of fun drawing and scribbling ensued and now, some 4 years later, she's up to writing letters and email and the like. Sadly the eMate isn't that good at visiting CBBC or CeeBeeBies because there's no colour and no flash but its still working brilliantly.
There are plenty of eMates on eBay: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37.l1313&satitle=emate&category0=
Jobs really screwed up when he pulled the Newton programme.
We've been looking at OpenMoko for a couple of weeks (we've got two) as a commercial prospect (other people pay us to develop free software) but haven't seen the light yet. Its got tons of potential but there is a huge gap between what the OpenMoko community thinks is viable and what the mainstream users will accept. Still, its an open market and it really is truly open source (right down to chip level) and not clouded by Apple, Microsoft or Google.